Preamble

The House met at half-past Nine o'clock

PRAYERS

[MR. SPEAKER in the Chair]

PETITIONS

Maryhill Community Care Scheme

Mrs. Maria Fyfe: I beg to present a petition from supporters of the Maryhill community care scheme, which has been endorsed by 1,000 signatures gathered at Maryhill and backed by members of Gairbraid church, St. Gregory's church, the Maryhill elderly forum, the Strathclyde elderly forum, the Forum on Disability, Age Concern, the Gairbraid tenants' association, Wyndford community council, Gairbraid community flat and local branches of the Transport and General Workers Union, the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union, the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the National Union of Mineworkers. It has also been supported by local councillors and, needless to say, by me.
The substance of the petition is
That a great disservice will be done to the needs and interests of many isolated, elderly and disabled people who have relied on the Maryhill community care scheme since 1984. The scheme has now closed because it does not meet the Government's criteria for funding and no other source of finance is there.

Wherefor your petitioners pray that your Honourable House ask the Secretary of State for Employment and the Secretary of State for Scotland to re-examine the criteria for funding, and meanwhile allow the scheme interim funds to enable it to continue for at least a short period of three or four months. Therefore your petitioners, as in duty bound, pray that the House accepts the petition.
To lie upon the Table.

Concessionary TV Licence

Mr. Greville Janner: I beg to present a petition from citizens of New Parks estate and from people in the city of Leicester, designed to change the present extraordinary anomaly whereby pensioners who live in warden-assisted accommodation obtain television licences at an annual fee of £5, while others who do not have the benefit of such assistance usually pay the full fee.
The humble Petition of citizens of the New Parks estate and of the city of Leicester showeth, that whereas for people who are elderly and disabled a television set is no luxury but often their main contact with outside life and shield against loneliness; whereas elderly and disabled people suffer greatly from inadequate pensions and other benefits; and whereas licence concessions are made for some pensioners and disabled people who live in council bungalows or sheltered accommodation; wherefor your Petitioners pray that your Honourable House will call upon Her Majesty's Government to remove the burden of television licence fees from old age pensioners and people who are registered as disabled; or in the alternative that Her Majesty's Government will extend privileges at present linmited to specific pensioners and disabled people who are in straitened circumstances; who are at present struggling to survive financially; for whom the dignity and quality of life is inadequate; and for whom the cost of television licences is unwarranted and a great burden.
The petition is signed by more than 500 citizens, and by me.
To lie upon the Table.

Orders of the Day — Right of Reply Bill

As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.

Mr. Greg Knight: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I refer you to page 1136 of the Amendment Paper. Amendment No. 29 deals with the Official Report. You have not selected that amendment for debate. I do not seek to challenge your judgment. It may be that when you read the Bill you observed, as I did, that clause 1(1) referred merely to a periodical. A periodical, as defined by "The Concise Oxford Dictionary", is something that is "published at regular intervals." It appears that the Official Report is likely to be caught, in any event, by the terms of the Bill. That raises a question of privilege. I am wondering whether the proceedings on the Bill should be deferred until the Committee of Privileges has had a chance to examine the question.

Mr. Speaker: If the hon. Member is making that allegation, he must raise it with me in the normal way.

Mr. Knight: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. I accept without question that when one raises a breach of privilege the matter must be raised in writing, but I am saying that this is an anticipated breach. Should the Bill ultimately become an Act, that could constitute a breach of privilege.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Member must table a motion to that effect. We have known for a long time that the Bill would be debated today. If the hon. Gentleman sincerely thought that this was a question of privilege, he should have raised it with me before.

Mr. Nicholas Budgen: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Are you able to say whether it is the intention of the Solicitor-General or the Attorney-General to grace us with their presence this morning? There may be an announcement about Mr. Justice Hoffmann's proposals, which would allow for speedier and cheaper resolution of disputes concerning the law of defamation. Many of the right hon. and hon. Members who support the measure believe that the cost of defamation proceedings is so great that it is impossible for a private citizen to take on a newspaper. If Mr. Justice Hoffmann's proposals were to be implemented, many right hon. and hon. Members might reconsider their position on the Bill.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Gentleman used the word "if." As the hon. Gentleman said, it has not yet happened. It is a premature point of order.

Mr. Tony Worthington: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. It may help us to make progress—this is the difference between my point of order and the others—if I were to intimate to you that I should be willing to accept—

Mr. Speaker: Order. No, not at this stage. If the hon. Gentleman mentions which amendments he is prepared to accept when we reach them, I am sure that that would expedite the proceedings on his Bill.

Mr. John Watts: Further to the point of order raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) and arising also from the amendment that stands in my name, Mr. Speaker. If our reading of the Bill is correct and the term "periodical" encompasses the Official Report of both this House and the other place, does not an issue of privilege arise concerning the other place? If that is so, should not the other place have been informed that this House is considering a matter that affects its privilege? Has the other place been so informed?

Mr. Speaker: That is another hypothetical matter. As the House would expect, I have been through the Bill and the amendments with the greatest of care and I think that I have been generous in my selection of amendments. They are all absolutely valid points and we should get on with them.

Mr. Jeff Rooker: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I do not seek to challenge your ruling in response to the point of order raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington). You said that we should wait until we reached the amendments. However, it would be helpful if the House understood from the outset that my hon. Friend is the chief sponsor and promoter of the Bill and that he is prepared to accept all the amendments in groups 4, 7, 8 and 9.

Mr. Speaker: That is a helpful suggestion. However, let us now get on.

New Clause 4

PRESS COMMISSION APPEAL TRIBUNAL

`(1) The Secretary of State shall appoint a panel of members of the Commission to sit as the Press Commission Appeal Tribunal ("the Appeal Tribunal").
(2) The provisions of Part II of the Schedule to this Act shall have effect with respect to the Appeal Tribunal.
(3) A party to a decision of the Commission may, within 28 days of being notified of that decision, appeal to the Appeal Tribunal; and on any such appeal the Appeal Tribunal may—

(a) affirm the decision of the Commission, or
(b) make any other determination which could have been made by the Commission.

(4) The Secretary of State may make rules—

(a) regulating appeals to the Appeal Tribunal;
(b) prescribing the practice and procedure to be followed on or in connection with appeals to the Appeal Tribunal, including the mode and burden of proof and admissibility of evidence to be received by the Appeal Tribunal and circumstances in which the Appeal Tribunal may hold an oral enquiry; and
(c) providing for other matters preliminary or incidental to or arising out of appeals to and decisions made by the Appeal Tribunal.

(5) The power to make rules under subsection (4) above shall be exercisable by statutory instrument; and a statutory instrument containing such rules shall be subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.'.—[Mr. Greg Knight.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Greg Knight: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 73, in clause 4, page 2, line 35, at end insert:
`subject to an appeal under section (Press Commission Appeal Tribunal).'.

No. 91, in page 2, line 35, at end insert:


`subject to the right of either party to appeal to the High Court or to the Court of Session in Scotland within 28 days of the decision being made. The decision of the High Court or of the Court of Session shall be final.'.

No. 100, in page 2, line 35, at end insert:
`subject to the right of either party to appeal decisions to the High Court, or the Court of Session in Scotland.'.

No. 33, in schedule, in page 4, line 39, at end add:
`If the panel determines that the complainant has not established a right under section 1 of this Act, the complainant shall have the right to appeal against that decision to the full Commission'.

No. 75, in page 4, line 39, at end add:

PART II

The Press Commission Appeal Tribunal
11. A panel of at least 3 Commissioners shall sit as necessary as the Appeal Tribunal to determine appeals.
12. No member of the Commission shall be appointed to the Appeal Tribunal until at least six months after his appointment to the Commission.
13. A person who is no longer a member of the Commission shall cease to be a member of the Appeal Tribunal
14. The Secretary and other officers appointed under Part I of this Schedule to assist the Commission shall assist the Appeal Tribunal in carrying out its duties.'.

Mr. Worthington: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. It may be helpful if I say that I am willing to accept new clause 4 and amendment No. 75.

Mr. Speaker: I call the hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) to speak to his new clause with that in mind.

Mr. Knight: I am grateful for what the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) has said. However, I am in some difficulty because I know that my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Mr. Watts) and for Keighley (Mr. Waller) are not convinced that the new clause is necessary. I must, therefore, place on record the reasons why the new clause should be added to the Bill. In doing so, I hope that I can persuade them to join the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie and me in supporting the new clause.
I should make my position clear from the outset. I oppose the Bill, but I do not rise to defend the worst excesses of Fleet street and Wapping. I am not saying that everything is perfect with the British press. I remind the House that this is not merely a debating Chamber. It is a legislative Chamber. The House must consider what would happen if the Bill became law.
In my view, the Bill is a dangerous threat to press freedom. It would undermine editorial direction and stifle investigative journalism. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) is a barrister-at-law and I have to tell him that in my view a newspaper is more than a mere passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment and advertising. The choice of the material to go into a newspaper and decisions as to the limitations on size and content of the newspaper—[Interruption.]

Mr. Edward Leigh: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) is trying to make a serious speech about new clause 4 in the face of barracking, noise and laughter. Press freedom is a serious matter. Press freedom is at stake. I want to hear what my hon. Friend is saying. [Interruption.] Opposition Members are shouting out, even now.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Paul Dean): Order. I hope that the House will listen to the hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight).

Mr. Dennis Skinner: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) is moving his new clause, although my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) has already said that he accepts it, so what is the point of making a speech about it?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Let us get on with the debate.

Mr. Greg Knight: As usual, the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) can only be half awake at this hour in the morning. When I rose to my feet I made it clear that it is all very well for the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie to say that he accepts my new clause, but I know that there are serious reservations on the Conservative Benches about—[Interruption.] I am seeking to persuade—

Mr. Norman Tebbit: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Skinner: He is being paid ·60,000 to come here this morning.

Mr. Tebbit: I cannot imagine that anybody would ever pay the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) anything to turn up anywhere. [Interruption.] I am not sure whether you can hear me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on my point of order, but I could not hear what my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) was saying because of the barracking of a number of Opposition Members who do not respect a free press and do not, furthermore, respect free speech in this House. Could you be so kind as to ensure that the debate is conducted in a manner in which I, at least, can hear what my hon. Friend is saying?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I hope that we shall get off to a good start on these important debates and that the House will listen to the hon. Member for Derby, North, who has the Floor.

Mr. Knight: Before the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch appeared to have a fit, I was saying that a newspaper was more than a passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment and advertising. The choice of material and the decisions about the size and content of a paper and the treatment of public issues, public officials and politicians, whether fair or unfair, involve the exercise of editorial control and judgment. I have yet to be convinced that Government regulation of that crucial process can be exercised consistent with a free press.

Mr. Barry Field: My hon. Friend mentioned that some Conservative Members had expressed reservations about new clause 4. Does he agree that the Bill is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, given that there are 1,800 provincial newspapers, many of which are held in high regard in the constituencies of hon. Members on both sides of the House for the way in which they report local affairs?

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I hope that when he has heard my arguments, he will decide that if we have to have the Bill it will be better with the addition of new clause 4. [Interruption.] Opposition Members keep


shouting that it has been accepted, but I will repeat for the third time that although the promoter of the Bill has been persuaded that he should accept new clause 4, I am surrounded by hostile hon. Friends who do not accept the need for new clause 4 and intend to divide the House. I am seeking to persuade my hon. Friends that they should not do that and that new clause 4 should be added to the Bill.

Mr. Spencer Batiste: I understand that the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) is prepared to accept only amendment No. 75 and new clause 4, both of which I have put my name to and I am pleased that he is prepared to accept them, but the only basis on which the Bill would be acceptable to me would be if the other amendments in the group, providing for an appeal to the courts, were also accepted. If there is not to be an appeal to the courts, a radically different approach to the group of amendments and the issues they raise is necessary.

Mr. Knight: I realise that I have to add my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet (Mr. Batiste) to the list of my hon. Friends who are unhappy about the new clause. I hope to persuade them otherwise during my speech.
It would be easy for opponents of the Bill to take a negative attitude and merely seek to divide the House on Third Reading, but I hope that the House will realise that we are trying to be constructive and improve the Bill. If the amendments are accepted, I hope that the Bill will be more acceptable to the House.
Before developing my argument in support of new clause 4, I congratulate the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie on the good-natured and fair way in which he steered the Bill through Committee. Even his opponents recognised his good nature and courtesy in Committee. He has been more good natured than some of my hon. Friends. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mr. Norris) will join us this morning, but ever since we concluded our proceedings in Committee, I have kept bumping into him in corridors and hearing him moan about the worst excesses of Fleet street. I hope that we shall have the pleasure of his company later.
Although the Government have made it clear that they are neutral, I hope that two of my hon. Friends who are Ministers will attend the debate, and although they cannot take part, will join me in the Division Lobby. I am referring to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Industry and Consumer Affairs, who has said that he agrees with most of my amendments to the Bill. I have not discussed the matter with my hon. Friend the Minister for Roads and Traffic, but on reading through the Official Report, I noticed that during the debate on the Parking Bill he said:
I look forward to attending the historic towns forum that is to take place … However I may wish to return early so that I may be negatively neutral on the Right of Reply Bill. Given my job, if I had a formal right of reply, half the newspapers would be full of items explaining that they had misunderstood me. I am one of the more misunderstood Ministers".— [Official Report, 7 April 1989; Vol. 150, c. 520.]

Mr. Ian Gow: While on the subject of those who are misunderstood, what representations has my hon. Friend received from my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath)?

Mr. Knight: I was rather surprised not to receive any representations from my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath). I have not seen him in the House for quite some time, perhaps because the House has not been considering matters that the Government consider particularly contentious. Perhaps that is the reason for my right hon. Friend's absence.

Mr. Watts: He is advertising cheese.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend the Member for Slough informs me that one of the reasons for my right hon. Friend's absence is that he is currently advertising cheese products on television.
New clause 4 introduces the right of appeal, which can be exercised by either party against the press commission to a press commission appeal tribunal which may affirm the original decision or make any other determination. The new clause also gives the Secretary of State powers to make rules to regulate the practices and procedures to be followed in connection with appeals. My hon. Friends may ask why we need an appeals procedure. I remind the House that the Bill as drafted gives powers of High Court enforcement. I consider that the Bill's provisions for the hearing of evidence are entirely unacceptable, and that an appeals procedure should be provided.
The Bill does not provide a right to be heard in person by the commission. It does not even provide a right to be legally represented, and parties are not required to give evidence under oath. Therefore, it is clear that there will be no right to cross-examination or to the examination of any relevant documents.

Mr. Leigh: My hon. Friend is making a very interesting case, but will he address a fundamental point that worries me? The very first line of new clause 4 refers to the Secretary of State. Many Conservative Members are worried that because of the excesses of two or three national titles, the 1,850 regional daily and weekly newspapers, which do a good job and try to act responsibly, may be clobbered. Much as we regret the excesses of one or two national titles, Conservative Members are fundamentally committed to press freedom and we are not convinced that my hon. Friend's new clause, in fiddling around with the Bill, will in any way improve it or address that problem.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend makes a valid point. The main answer to his question is that the Bill should be opposed, but, as I said a few moments ago, we are considering a Bill on Report and I felt that it was more constructive to seek to alleviate some of the problems that the Bill will cause than simply to oppose it. My hon. Friend referred to clobbering the press. If he reads new clause 4, he will realise that it seeks to alleviate the clobbering of the press by providing a right of appeal.

Mr. Watts: I have been listening very carefully to my hon. Friend's development of his argument. Subsection (1) of new clause 4 states that the appeal body should be composed of a panel of members of the commission. Is that not the same as having the right of appeal against the refusal of planning permission to a panel of members of the planning committee which refused the application in the first place? Is it not a vicious circle into which those who fall into the clutches of the commission will be bound ever more tightly? How will the appeal be independent? Is it not a mere charade and facade?

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend has been rather harsh in his criticism. One hopes that those appointed will be responsible and independently minded people who have some knowledge of the working of the newspaper industry and who, therefore, would exercise their judgment freely when asked to review a decision of the full commission.

10 am

Mr. Tebbit: I am not happy about new clause 4, because it seems merely to complicate the Bill without giving any real assurance of the freedom of the press. The debate is about appointing a press commission, not a right of reply board. I disagree with my hon. Friend over whether the commissioners, or whatever we choose to call them, should sit on appeals against their own judgments. I think, as my hon. Friend does, that the commissioners would be responsible men and women and, after all, it should not be my hon. Friend who is criticising this but Opposition Members. They claim frequently that there can be no proper appeal or investigation of matters, for example concerning the police, because the police conduct the inquiries themselves. We always say that the police, like the commissioners, are honourable men and women who can be trusted to do a proper job. I hope that my hon. Friend will explain how the appeals will be conducted. Will they be conducted with barristers, lawyers, and cross-examination? How will they work?

Mr. Knight: I shall deal with my right hon. Friend's first point now and his other point later. I do not think that he chose a good analogy when he referred to complaints initiated against the police. In that instance, a police officer from another constabulary will carry out the investigation. I am not suggesting that editors from another newspaper should sit on the appeal board. It will consist of people appointed by the Secretary of State and they would not necessarily be editors who are currently in charge of a newspaper. Therefore, that point was not particularly valid.

Mr. Tebbit: My hon. Friend has missed my point. The appeals procedure he is setting up is not for appeals against the view of editors but for someone who wants to appeal against the decision of the commissioners. Yet the commissioners will be sitting on that appeals board. The Bill stinks. The concept of commissioners being appointed by the state to govern the press is anathema to most Conservative Members. However, my hon. Friend missed my point and perhaps he will deal with it in a little more detail now.

Mr. Knight: I understand my right hon. Friend's point. I would not envisage that a commissioner who sat on the original hearing would be one of the commissioners sitting on the appeal. If my right hon. Friend is thinking, "Well, new clause 4 does not say that", I should point out that the new clause makes it clear that there are to be rules laid down by the Secretary of State to determine the manner of the hearing of the appeals and other matters ancillary thereto.
I am hoping—no doubt my hon. Friend the Minister will make it clear when he replies—that such things would be dealt with in the rules. I accept that there may be criticism and that some of my hon. Friends may think that I should have added the rules to the new clause. I thought that the matter should be reflected upon in the light of today's debate. Therefore, when I drafted the new clause

I wanted it to allow my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to consider our debate and then formulate the rules. I want to give my right hon. Friend some flexibility in the light of our proceedings.

Mr. Gow: There is an important point to which my hon. Friend has not referred. Under new clause 4 some members of the commission will be allowed to hear an appeal. My hon. Friend has told the House that the commissioners will be appointed by the Secretary of State. However, when reference is made in the Bill to "Secretary of State" does that not mean any Secretary of State, so that, for example, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales could appoint commissioners? Why does my hon. Friend have greater confidence in the ability of the Secretary of State for Wales to choose commissioners than in his judgment on monetary and economic matters?

Mr. Knight: If the commissioners were to be appointed by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales, I hope that he would appoint my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup, because it would at least give him something useful to do with his time.
Clause 4(4) forces the commission to deal properly with any complaint. Hon. Members will know that it must give a decision within 28 days of receiving a complaint unless, according to the Bill,
it is not reasonably practicable to do so within that time limit.
It does not say to whom it must be "reasonably practicable". Is it to one of the parties, both the parties, or the commission? The 28-day period does not allow time for correspondence, let alone consideration of the evidence.

Mr. Batiste: My hon. Friend is coming to what I think is one of the fundamental flaws in the concept of the Bill and I am interested to know how he will deal with it. If there is a voluntary system, it could—though it does not in the case of the Press Council—operate quickly and effectively. When one moves, as the Bill does, in the direction of statutory rights, one needs statutory protection as well. As the role of the press commission develops, we shall lose all its informality, flexibility and potential for speed because of the inevitable need to protect the rights of both parties involved.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend has made a valid point. I think that he may be coming round to the view that there should be an appeals procedure to remedy any injustice that occurs. I hope that that is his ultimate conclusion.

Mr. Batiste: My first preference would have been that the remedy should lie in an accelerated procedure to county courts in the first instance rather than to the press commission. Having regard to the strong feelings expressed in the Bill that matters should be dealt with through a press commission, I would go along with that as long as there is the opportunity to appeal within it and then the ultimate appeal to the courts.

Mr. Knight: I am grateful for that clarification.
I remind the House that the commission is given further power to order a right of reply where it feels that a newspaper has not responded with sufficient urgency to allow the commission to make a judgment within 28 days of the receipt of the complaint. However, nowhere in the


Bill is there any definition of what is "sufficient urgency". The procedure contained in the Bill has nothing to do with justice but everything to do with making a quick decision.

Sir Nicholas Bonsor: In order for justice to be done in such cases as would arise under the Bill, it is essential that there should be a speedy right of reply. A right of reply that happens months after the original statement is made will serve no useful purpose for the person who has been libelled by the newspaper. Therefore, I oppose the new clause because it will make the procedure even longer than the system proposed in the Bill. Speed is of the essence in any right of reply.

Mr. Knight: We all agree with that. However, I hope that, in his pursuit of speed, my hon. Friend is not willing to sacrifice justice. That is my fear.

Sir Nicholas Bonsor: That is all very well, but one has to look at what the Bill is seeking to achieve. It seeks to give somebody who has been accused in a factually incorrect manner of having done something, or of being something that he is not, a right of reply to put the opposite case. That is all the Bill is trying to achieve. My hon. Friend talks about justice. The amount of inaccurate rubbish that one reads in national newspapers these days is so appalling that surely it must be right for the House to take the view that somebody should be able to rebut it and that the editors of the newspapers should have a duty to publish that rebuttal.

Mr. Knight: Yes, but I do not know from where people will be found to sit on the commission who are infallible. I am worried that the commissioners may make a mistake, and under the Bill as it is drafted no remedy is available, except an expensive legal process.

Mr. Gary Waller: My hon. Friend mentioned the importance of justice, about which I entirely agree, but does he accept that it often tends to be expensive? Under the new clause, the appeal procedure being proposed will be expensive for not only appellants but defendants. Who will pay the costs of the appeal procedure? Who will pay the costs of newspapers against which complaints of little substance have been made?

Mr. Knight: New clause 4 is far less expensive than some of the other appeal procedures, such as an appeal to the High Court.

Mr. Leigh: Does my hon. Friend realise that he is getting himself into an awful muddle? Supporters of the Bill, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Sir N. Bonsor), say that speed, simplicity and cheapness are of the essence. My hon. Friend is trying to impose a quasi-judicial appeal procedure on what should be a simple and rapid system.

Mr. Knight: I am not in an awful muddle. I am trying to drive a course down the middle between my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Sir N. Bonsor) and my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh), who are on opposing sides. Surely we can achieve a compromise between no appeal procedure and the only available alternative of the High Court.

Mr. Leigh: In trying to drive down the middle, is not my hon. Friend beginning to understand that the Bill is fundamentally flawed because it is impossible to drive a middle course? There must either be a legal procedure, which we have enjoyed in this country and which protects individual rights, or a statutory procedure. A quasi-judicial process cannot be imposed on a statutory procedure, which is the problem facing my hon. Friend.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend and I are at one in our views of the Bill. Some of my hon. Friends may not have heard because of the racket emanating from the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch, but at the outset I said that I opposed the Bill. New clause 4 finds a middle way and improves what I still regard as a defective Bill. My hon. Friend's excessive pleading for the existing system of justice is tinged by the fact that he is a member of the legal profession and may fear that if the new clause were passed it would deprive lawyers of their fat appeal fees. I say that, without malice, as a lawyer.

Mr. Batiste: I am relieved that my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) shares my concern about this matter. As a lawyer, I say that we do not wish to perpetuate the system, but from our long experience we know that injustice arises when one tries to take short cuts. One may be able to make summary decisions in many instances about a factual inadequacy, but in many circumstances the issues will be extremely complex, such as allegations of fraud or malpractice that fall short of criminality. I do not understand how a statutory procedure under which qualified lawyers cannot operate, which has no power to call evidence under oath and to subpoena witnesses or documents, can possibly achieve justice in such complex cases. The fabric of the Bill is based on simple cases and ignores the complex.

Mr. Knight: I am not sure that my hon. Friend makes a good point. The new clause provides for new rules to be laid in due course. I expect them to contain requirements for the calling of witnesses and oral hearings at which witnesses can be cross-examined. We are debating not an investigation into complex fraud matters but a factual inaccuracy in a newspaper to which someone is seeking a right of reply.

Mr. Batiste: If a newspaper implies, for example, that a second-hand car dealer has been guilty of malpractice, whether or not criminality is implied at the same time, the issues could be complex.

Mr. Knight: I take my hon. Friend's point. When the rules are laid in due course, I expect them to make provision for the legal representation of both parties appearing before the tribunal. I hope that the Home Office will agree, but I believe that the rules should make such provision.

Mr. Watts: Does my hon. Friend accept that he is being a little naive in expecting that the issues that will fall to be determined by the commission will be clear cut? Surely there is hardly a newspaper in the country that would not be prepared to correct a simple and straightforward inaccuracy. Complaints will arise when facts are disputed and cannot be readily established. In such circumstances, the issues involved will be similar to those in a libel case.

Mr. Knight: I am not sure that my hon. Friend is right. Contention will arise not just on whether a statement of fact is accurate but under clause 1(1)(1), which says that the factual inaccuracy must be such that
any reasonable person might deem to be damaging to the character, reputation or good standing of that person or body of persons.
Most challenges will be to that part of clause 1(1).

Mr. Lewis Stevens: Despite my hon. Friend's explanation, does he agree that the establishment of what is a fact is much more complex? Is it not true that in the Chamber, day after day, we dispute so-called facts? Will that not now be carried over into the press?

Mr. Knight: According to the Oxford dictionary, a fact is something that is
certainly known to have occurred or be true".
On appeal, it will be not a particular fact but the effect of a factual inaccuracy that will be in contention.

Mr. Tebbit: My hon. Friend is in deep difficulty. Let us consider cases alleging misdoing in the City, such as insider trading. Initially, such accusations frequently surface in the press. Is my hon. Friend suggesting that if someone took such allegations to the press commission, required a newspaper to set the record straight and publish a correction, the commission would be able to come to a conclusion without an examination as rigorous as if someone were charged with a criminal offence and appeared at the Old Bailey? Such proceedings, especially given that my hon. Friend has said that lawyers should become involved, could go on not for days or weeks but for years, as some major fraud cases do. The press commission itself would not work, let alone the appeal committee of three unfortunate perhaps not legally qualified men or women sitting on an appeal, on a matter that already had been before the commission for two or three years.

Mr. Knight: My right hon. Friend has raised an interesting point, especially as the Bill does not explain what the burden of proof before the commission should be. I have proceeded so far on the assumption that the person making the complaint would need to prove his case beyond reasonable doubt, but the commissioners may take a wholly different view. I accept what my right hon. Friend has said on that, but I should have thought that if the Bill became law, there would be an incentive for editors to ensure that they had the correct facts at their fingertips before they proceeded to publish an article. If they were unable to show that they had the factual details to hand, I would expect to see them lose before the commission and the right to reply to be given.

Mr. Brian Wilson: No one expects anything better from the general run of the miserable rabble of mediocrities who are conducting this charade, but would the hon. Gentleman agree that it is sad and pathetic to find a former Secretary of State reduced to the level of Friday morning filibusterer? Could the hon. Gentleman arrange among his colleagues for a £10 a head whip round to give the former Secretary of State a sense of being of more central importance in life?

Mr. Knight: I should not have given way to the hon. Gentleman. What is rather pathetic is that, although the Labour party has said that it supports the Bill

wholeheartedly, I observe that there are only a small number of Labour Members in the Chamber at he moment.

Mr. Batiste: Does my hon. Friend note the incongruity that Opposition Members argue that there should be a statutory right of reply against factual inaccuracies, vet they have advanced their case this morning only by heaping abuse on those who happen to disagree with them? Does my hon. Friend consider that there is some ambiguity in their approach which reinforces our real fear that the Bill is an Opposition attempt to gag the press?

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is right. I shall now return to the argument I was developing a few moments ago. Despite the composition and powers of the commission under the Bill, no right of appeal is contained in it. The only appeal open to aggrieved parties would be by way of a judicial review in the High Court.

Mr. Watts: I thought that my hon. Friend was going to elaborate further on his reply to our right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit). My hon. Friend has left me confused about his view on the burden of proof required. He started by saying that the complainant would need to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the facts were as stated and that damage had been suffered. He then said that he would expect the newspaper to be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it had a factual basis for its article. I thought that he left the matter in mid air because of the intervention by the hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson). My hon. Friend leaves me up in the air. I am not clear what he considers should be the burden of proof when appeal is heard by the tribunal.

Mr. Knight: The reason that I left my hon. Friend in the air was that the Bill leaves the issue in the air. The Bill is badly drafted and does not state what the burden of proof should be. I left the matter in the air because I was merely speculating about how the process might operate. My hon. Friend is right. Where does the burden of proof lie? Does it lie with the complainant or the newspaper? We do not know, because the Bill does not tell us. That is why I began my remarks by saying that I was opposed to the Bill. Its drafting is awful, because it does not resolve the issue. If it is the will of the House that, bad as it is, the Bill should proceed, we should graft onto it a right of appeal which may not be perfect but would seem to remedy some of the difficulties that would, undoubtedly, arise should the Bill become law.
As I said before my hon. Friend the member for Slough intervened, the only way that someone could challenge a decision by the commission would be by applying for a judicial review. That is a wholly inappropriate method of appealing against decisions by the press commission. It would mean that a party would have to show that the commission had acted ultra vires, had misinterpreted the law, or acted wholly unreasonably in the circumstances. That cannot be to the benefit of either the complainant or the newspaper or periodical.
I was delighted to see that point picked up by Mr.Bernard Levin in an excellent article in The Times on 18 April in which he said, referring to the press commission:
And the "judgements" of this kangaroo court are final: there is no form of appeal (for either side), and anyone who is dissatisfied by a ruling has no recourse other than to go to


the courts for judicial review, which inevitably means that only millionaires can afford to seek justice from this appalling contraption.
Hear, hear. Mr. Bernard Levin has got it right. It is an appalling contraption and to allow an appeal only by way of a judicial review will not remedy the defects that the Bill's promoter, the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie, talked about in Committee. He said that the Bill was intended to be a way of achieving cheap justice so that the common man could have the facts put right. If the Bill allows an appeal only by way of judicial review, only someone like Tiny Rowlands will be able to seek to have decisions overturned. The man on the Clapham omnibus will be left facing an injustice if the comission decides unfairly against him.

Mr. Leigh: Does my hon. Friend know of any appeal procedure in our jurisdiction where the members of the appeal tribunal are drawn from the court of first instance? Is that not the worrying and serious point that Conservative Members are trying to address? This is not a charade; it is a serious matter of press freedom and upsetting traditional judicial procedures. The hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) is in the newspaper business himself—the working man's Murdoch, although he did not declare an interest. We are obliged to submit the Bill to the closest possible scrutiny. How can my hon. Friend meet the point that the members of the appeal tribunal made the decision in the first place? Does that conform with the principles of natural justice in this country? Of course not.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is rather overstating the case. I would not expect to see the panel for the appeal composed of those commissioners who took part in the original decision. Let me give an analogy. If a police officer is charged with a disciplinary offence, he has an ultimate right of appeal to the Home Secretary. It could be argued that the Home Secretary has an interest in the matter because he is responsible for the police in the first instance. My hon. Friend's fears are not as weighty as he would have the House believe. A system of appeals to review certain decisions is a familiar part of society today.

Mr. Timothy Wood: I want to pursue the matter further. The analogy with the police is not satisfactory. It is suggested that of the 21 commissioners, three should be taken out. To speak about them as though they would be a wholly separate group, as one police force is separate from another, is wrong. The commission will be a small and coherent group of individuals. To say that three of them will question the decisions of the other 18 is an absurd proposition.

Mr. Knight: It is not absurd. We are discussing intelligent and independently minded people who will have the interests of the press at heart and a desire to see justice done. The situation will not be as bad as my hon. Friend suggests.

Mr. Leigh: We can only deal with the new clause as it appears on the amendment paper. It does not make it crystal clear that someone who has heard a case in the court of first instance will not also hear it on appeal. That is the fundamental problem. Could we not use the more

traditional way of going about things and provide for appeals to the High Court? Surely that would be preferable to people sitting in judgment on their colleagues.

Mr. Knight: As the debate proceeds, I realise that it was perhaps an error not to include in the new clause the rules that I envisaged that the Secretary of State would ultimately lay. I have every confidence in my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary—

Mr. Watts: That is not good enough.

Mr. Knight: I would expect proper rules to be laid in due course to provide for a fair system of appeals. If that does not happen, there is no point in providing for rules to be laid in the first place.

Mr. Watts: May I suggest to my hon. Friend a way out of this difficulty? Could he not table a manuscript amendment to make it clear that no commissioner who had taken part in the original proceedings should be allowed to be part of the panel that would consider an appeal against that decision? Might not that be a way forward if Mr. Deputy Speaker were prepared to accept a manuscript amendment at this stage?

Mr. Knight: I am not prepared to table a manuscript amendment at this stage. Perhaps my hon. Friend will allow me to develop my theme and explain the reasons behind the new clause. Then, if I have not convinced him by the end of the debate, and if he wishes to table a manuscript amendment, I shall not seek to divide the House. I expect these matters to be properly dealt with by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary in due course. On reflection, I do not think that it would be right and proper for me to set down the rules in the new clause, because the rules should be laid after careful consideration.

Mr. Batiste: As my hon. Friend knows, I support new clause 4, although I have some reservations about the way in which it might work. If we decide against the initial court proposal, we should use the model of industrial tribunals and the employment appeal tribunals as a structure that would be generally acceptable in dealing with the matter. The difficulty that we face is that the membership of industrial tribunals is much more circumscribed than is provided for in the Bill and the membership of the employment appeal tribunals is drawn from an entirely different group of people, who do not sit at a court of first instance. Therefore, while I share my hon. Friend's belief that the Minister will come up with a procedure that works very well, it seems to me that the Bill would prohibit the Minister from putting in place a structure that has proved satisfactory elsewhere.

Mr. Knight: I agree with my hon. Friend's comments about the structure of the Bill; it is a badly drafted Bill. I know that my hon. Friends are still not happy about this point, but the Home Office has experience in such matters. We have a system of immigration appeals with rules laid down by the Home Office, and I have every confidence in the ability of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to deal with the matter properly and fairly. I know that he will try to ensure that justice is done on appeal.
The Bill provides for the press commission to issue guidance on the question of editorial standards.

Mr. Tebbit: What?

Mr. Knight: It is there in the Bill. I do not like it, any more than my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) likes it. The press commission's advice on such matters would be better received by the press if it arose from case histories that had been subject to scrutiny by the press commission appeal tribunal that the new clause seeks to establish.

Mr. Batiste: I hope that my hon. Friend will not seek to justify the new clause with reference to the later guideline provisions. An amendment in my name, which has been selected for debate, seeks to strike out that part of the Bill, which seems to me to lay down a framework for censorship.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is right. I, too, would like that provision to be deleted from the Bill. I am proceeding on the assumption that that will not happen and that we are lumbered with it and I have tabled the new clause to make it more palatable.
As I have said to my hon. Friends, there are precedents in the immigration procedure and the police disciplinary appeals procedure. I believe that there is also a system of appeal under the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975.
I take a fairly flexible view of the rules that I should expect my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to lay. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister—

Mr. Leigh: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend the Member for Elmet (Mr. Batiste) has made an important point. You will be aware that amendment No. 50 deals with a vital matter—the guidelines on editorial freedom. In view of the importance of that amendment, might it not be convenient if our proceedings on the new clause were suspended so that we could debate amendment No. 50? We could return to the new clause thereafter. Interesting though I find the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight), the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet is important. It goes to the core of the Bill and the points about which we are worried. We have limited time and we want to discuss these matters. Would you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, consider suspending our proceedings on the new clause and returning to it later?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I think that we had better get on with the debate. If we proceed along the lines suggested by the hon. Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh), we shall soon get into a great muddle.

Mr. Knight: I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I think that I have been extremely generous in giving way to my hon. Friends, and perhaps I should try to make some progress. I am delighted to see that my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Mr. Soames) has entered the Chamber. I hope that he is here to give me his support on this important matter.

Mr. Gow: Having welcomed my hon. Friend the member for Crawley (Mr. Soames), will my hon. Friend the Member for Derby (Mr. Knight) now give way to him?

Mr. Knight: If my hon. Friend wishes to intervene, I shall be happy to give way, even though he is wearing a rather garish jacket.

Mr. Gow: I cannot allow that to pass without comment. My hon. Friend the Member for Crawley is impeccably dressed, as always. I hope that my hon. Friend will withdraw his remarks.

Mr. Knight: My remarks were not intended as a slur but merely a comment on the fact that my hon. Friend's taste is different from mine. I shall not get sidetracked into discussing my hon. Friend's dress. Perhaps I should not have made the remark in the first place.

Mr. Watts: My hon. Friend has referred several times to the rules being laid by the Secretary of State for the Home Department. He also referred by analogy to immigration appeals tribunals. But the control of the rules for those tribunals is a matter for the Lord Chancellor, and for a very good reason. Any proceedings before any appeal tribunal are, in essence, judicial proceedings and should come under the senior Law Officer in the Government—the head of the judiciary—and not a departmental Minister whose other responsibilities may well conflict with his duty to ensure that a free and fair judicial procedure is available as envisaged in the new clause.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind the House that we are not in Committee but on Report, and interventions must be brief.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend the Member for Slough is technically right when he says that the Lord Chancellor has responsibility. However, in drafting the new clause I took the view that, as the Bill deals with the press, and as responsibility for the press is clearly a matter for the Home Office, the Secretary of State for the Home Department would be the appropriate Minister to lay the rules.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Tim Renton): I have been following my hon. Friend's argument closely. The process is as follows. The adjudication officers and the adjudication appeal tribunals are, indeed, appointed by the Lord Chancellor. That system was set up two years ago to show their distinct identity from the Home Office. The Home Office sets and puts the immigration rules before the House, and it is the job of the adjudicators, appointed by the Lord Chancellor's Department, to interpret those immigration rules.

Mr. Knight: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention. He has shown that the drafting of the new clause is in order and is not as unusual as my hon. Friend the Member for Slough appeared to think.
I now ask my hon. Friend the Minister several questions. I hope that, when he replies, he can confirm certain matters. Will it be feasible for the rules, when they are laid in due course, to contain provision for costs? I notice that in other matters in which there is a right of appeal the Secretary of State may direct that an appellant pay the whole or any part of his own costs. That is important to deter a frivolous appeal from the decision of the press commission. I hope that the rules will contain a provision to allow costs to be awarded—not necessarily in every case, but when it is right and proper to do so. When an appellant is found to have pursued a frivolous and worthless appeal, he should be condemned in costs. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will confirm that it is possible to mention that point in the rules.
Does my hon. Friend consider it appropriate—I certainly do—that the press commission should be


required to give written reasons for its appeal decisions? That is imperative. The rules under the police disciplinary procedure make it clear that an appellant may attend proceedings, conduct his appeal, or be represented. I hope that that matter will be covered in the rules. It is certainly my intention that anyone who wishes to pursue an appeal should be able to be represented by whomever he chooses —a friend, lawyer or, perhaps, someone else who has knowledge of the newpaper industry.
Will my hon. Friend confirm that it is in order for the rules to require that the appellant or his representative may make oral or written representations in support of the appeal? I hope that my hon. Friend agrees that the rules should state that the appellant may adduce evidence only if it is evidence which, for valid reasons, was not adduced at the original hearing. The appeal procedure should not be a complete re-hearing with new evidence without justification for its being admitted. Such a matter could be contained in the rules made by my hon. Friend the Home Secretary.

Mr. Batiste: If an original hearing can be conducted on the basis of written representations only, one of the grounds of appeal would be that insufficient weight was given to certain aspects of evidence, or that a conflict between the written evidence given by both sides was inadequately determined and did not follow the weight of the facts. Would it be incumbent on the appeal tribunal to read evidence—perhaps first-hand evidence—on the subject? I hope that my hon. Friend will not suggest that that would be excluded.

Mr. Knight: When I was considering the matter, I noticed that paragraph 26(6) of the 1985 police disciplinary regulations stated:
The appellant or his representative may make oral or written representations in support of the appeal but may only adduce evidence which could not have been adduced or which was not adduced for reasons which satisfy the person considering the appeal at the hearing at which the charge was found proved.
We need a rule along those lines to prevent a sloppy complaint being made, an appeal being pursued, and evidence being produced on appeal which was readily available at the hearing of the initial complaint before the press commission but which, for no valid reason, was not produced.

Mr. Batiste: I have great difficulty with that proposition. It is inherent in the conflict between having a voluntary procedure and moving to a statutory procedure. My hon. Friend said that he was trying to steer a middle course between the two. If we are trying to have something informal in which people do not need legal representation and have easy access to the press commission, as in many other tribunals, a complainant's initial stab will probably be inept and incomplete, and he may not put in the necessary evidence to do justice to his case.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend has taken us back to something with which the majority of Conservative Members agree. The Bill is sloppily drafted. It is a requirement that the chairman of an industrial tribunal is a legally qualified person. That being so, the chairman of the tribunal of first instance will guide an unrepresented complainant through his case and try to elicit information

which that person would not otherwise have put before the tribunal. The danger with the Bill is that there is no requirement for the chairman of the press commission to be a legally qualified person.
10.45 am
In that case, there may be the problem that the chairman of the press commission will not guide an unrepresented applicant through his case. There is a good argument for the Bill being amended—perhaps in another place—to make it a requirement that the chairman of the press commission is a lawyer. That being so, the problems which my hon. Friend envisages would not arise.

Mr. Batiste: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Knight: I have given way a lot. I will give way again, but I hope that my hon. Friend will allow me to develop my argument.

Mr. Batiste: As drafted, the Bill specifies some aspects of the composition of the press commission, but it does not specify a legally qualified chairman. Consequently, when my right hon. Friend lays down the rules, he would not be able, in secondary legislation, to specify that the chairman of the commission, panel, or appeal must be a lawyer.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is right to a point. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State would not be able to interfere with the chairmanship of the press commission, but, in laying the rules for the hearing of an appeal, he probably could insist that the chairman of the appeal tribunal should, if possible, have legal qualifications. That could be written in the rules. I agree that it would have been far better if the Bill had that requirement in it.

Mr. Leigh: What worries me about what my hon. Friend is saying is that, on a Friday morning, in a throwaway line, he starts laying down rules of evidence. He said that what has not been heard at first instance should not be heard on appeal. As a lawyer, is my hon. Friend aware that the rules of evidence in ordinary judicial courts have taken seven centuries to develop? We will have a voluntary system, a statutory system, or a system of common law. I return to my original point, which I made nearly an hour ago. My hon. Friend is in a muddle.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is a lawyer. I do not know whether he has a blue bag or a red bag. If he has a red bag, it should be taken from him, and he should be given back the blue bag. He has not been listening to what I have been saying. I am not trying to lay down rules of evidence. I ask my hon. Friend to read new clause 4. I have made provision for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to be able to lay rules in due course. I am seeking to elicit from my hon. Friend the Minister what sort of rules he envisages being laid. I am giving him some suggestions.

Mr. Jeremy Corbyn: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Knight: I shall give way in a moment, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not make a frivolous intervention. I have given way many times today. No one can accuse me of being ungenerous. However, I want to make progress because there are many other amendments to consider.
I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) that I am seeking today not to


lay down rules of evidence but to make the point that the Secretary of State should be given the power to determine in due course what rules should be made for the appeals commission.
The police disciplinary regulations 1985 state:
The person considering the appeal may in his discretion admit written evidence which would not be admissible but for this paragraph but which would have been admissible if given orally.
I hope that such a rule will be included in the proposed legislation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet says, we must be flexible and take account of the unrepresented appellant who may, for example, produce documents but forget to ensure the attendance of the author of those documents as a witness.

Mr. Corbyn: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that there are throughout the country many people who are deeply aggrieved by the way in which the British popular press operates? Radio 4 carried an excellent item this morning about the way in which the people or Liverpool have been maligned by The Sun journalists in particular and others from the Murdoch empire. Many of those who have been maligned are looking to Parliament today to provide them with an avenue of redress. I refer to ordinary people—not wealthy people or public figures—who look to Parliament to provide them with redress against the gross misuse of power by many sections of the media, including the Murdoch empire.
Many of those people who will be reading of this debate in tomorrow's newspapers will realise that the hon. Gentleman has made a crude attempt to filibuster on behalf of the Murdoch moguls and the Murdoch empire to prevent ordinary people from having redress against gross injustices by the press. Does not the hon. Gentleman agree that ordinary people who are maligned, misrepresented and lied about by journalists should have the right of redress against the media's abuse of power? Why does not the hon. Gentleman bring his contribution to an early close so that other right hon. and hon. Members may contribute to the debate and so that the House will have an opportunity to vote on this important matter?

Mr. Knight: The only crude part of my contribution was my reference to the jacket being worn by my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley, which I withdrew.
I did not notice the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) in his place when I started moving new clause 4, so I assume that he missed my opening remarks. I am sorry that he is delaying the proceedings even further, because he compels me en passant to repeat my opening comments. I am not here to defend the worst excesses of Fleet street or of Wapping. However, this is not merely a debating Chamber—we are considering legislation. Even if we accept that the press makes mistakes and that reports appear in the press that are not right, the House has a duty to ask today, "Is this the kind of legislation we want to see on the statute book?" My answer is a resounding no. Having said that, right hon. and hon. Members opposed to the Bill have a duty to be positive and not negative. That is why I seek to graft on to the Bill a right of appeal.
As to the many thousands of people throughout the country that the hon. Gentleman says want something to be done about press abuse, I will gladly let the hon. Gentleman know the address and telephone number of Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper, the new chairman of the Press Council, because the public can pursue such matters

through the avenue of a complaint to the council. I have every confidence in Mr. Blom-Cooper, who has made it clear that he wants to revamp the council and make it more effective. He should be given a chance to do just that.

Mr. Batiste: We all share resentment of abuses by some sectors of the press. I can see how the Press Council could provide a remedy against biased or overstated reporting in the tabloid press, but I cannot see how the Bill as drafted could provide any remedy for the people of Liverpool.

Mr. Roger King: rose—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman cannot intervene in an intervention.

Mr. Knight: To save time, I gladly give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. King).

Mr. King: In Committee, we argued at great length in an attempt to sharpen the Bill. However, the intervention of the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) highlights one point to which we have never been given a satisfactory answer. Perhaps my hon. Friend's proposed appeals procedure will deal with this point. I refer to the criticism that the people of Liverpool are unable to seek redress. Would they be able to do so as a body of persons?

Mr. Knight: If I address new clauses 1 and 2, I am sure that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, would rebuke me. The Bill refers to
A person or a body of persons
—meaning an unincorporated association, or a company. One of the other fears shared by many of my hon. and right hon. Friends is that a political party would be able to seek a right of reply. As I understand it, an organisation such as the IRA would be allowed to seek a right of reply to what it regarded as an insulting article. At the end of the day, I should like to see the Bill defeated.

Mr. Martin Flannery: All kinds of people have said all manner of things about the Hillsborough tragedy, including the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Patnick). I have tried to have my comments reported in the press, but I have not managed to do that. The hon. Member for Hallam made a disgraceful statement that was reproduced in The Sun on a major scale. The Sun maintains that its report is true. How can we enjoy any redress if moguls such as Murdoch do not allow it? The hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) is making remarks on behalf of people like Murdoch.

Mr. Knight: I know that Opposition Members enjoy criticising Rupert Murdoch but it is stretching things a bit far to criticise The Sun for accurately reporting the comments of a Member of the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Patnick) must answer for his own remarks. If the hon. Gentleman is upset by my hon. Friend's remarks, I hope that he will seek to clarify them. However, we cannot criticise the press for accurately reporting hon. Members' remarks.

Mr. Tebbit: The hon. Members for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) and for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Flannery) make extremely important points. There is undoubtedly a great deal of hurt and indignation felt on all sides about reports that have appeared in may sections of the press about the Hillsborough tragedy. An inquiry into


that disaster has been commissioned, and it will eventually produce a report and set out what it believes to be the facts. The Bill will require the press commission, within 28 days of receiving a complaint of the type that the hon. Member for Hillsborough might strongly feel justified in making, to reach a conclusion as to the facts of the matter. It would have the power to force a newspaper to publish "facts" that subsequently might be found to be not the true facts. This is a perfect example of the dilemma that I put to my hon. Friend earlier.

Mr. Knight: There is not one hon. Member who regards Hillsborough as anything but a disaster. We are all upset about those who lost their lives, and feel sorrow for their families. There is a good case for maintaining a dignified silence about that tragedy until the inquiry has reported. If it reveals that the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Hallam—who is not in his place—were incorrect, I am sure that he will be the first to clarify the position.

Mr. Watts: Can my hon. Friend tell me from his reading of the Bill whether a disputed opinion reported in a newspaper, such as the comments attributed to our hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Patnick), could be considered a factual inaccuracy affecting a person or body of persons, which could include the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Flannery)? My understanding is that it could not. If the newspaper had reported accurately what our hon. Friend said, it cannot be guilty of a factual inaccuracy. Other hon. Gentlemen may have a different opinion, but I cannot see that the Bill would give any redress to the sort of grievance raised by the hon. Member for Hillsborough. Perhaps a sponsor of the Bill would like to seek your indulgence, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to intervene and clarify the point. It is of considerable interest as two hon. Gentlemen have intervened on the misunderstanding that the Bill would provide redress in those circumstances.

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Mr. Knight: I accept the concern of hon. Gentlemen about the Hillsborough tragedy and it is shared by my hon. Friends. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough is right. The Bill would not help in those circumstances. As I said in my first reply to the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Flannery), if The Sun accurately reported what an hon Member said, there would be no remedy under the Bill. It is for hon. Members to argue in the House about the opinions expressed.
I am being waylaid into irrelevancies. The Bill is not relevant to that tragedy. I hope to convince the House that if we must have the Bill, we should have an appeals procedure included in it. I know that I have convinced the promoter but that some of my hon. Friends are uneasy about having the Bill at all. I ask them to agree that, if the Bill is to become law, we shall improve it by adding an appeals procedure to it.

Mr. Roger King: I shall welcome some clarification. My hon. Friend's new clause suggests that the claimant would have to go through the right of reply adviser and the press commission, and that if he was not satisfied with the result, he could take his case to appeal. If the applicant had gone to the adviser who had said that he did not have a case, but, as in the recent football tragedy, that person or body

of persons felt that they had a case and went to the press commission, which would not accept the case, could they go through the appeals procedure? If those two bodies ruled against his case, could a claimant make an appeal?

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is under some sort of misapprehension about the role of the right of reply adviser. I do not see him as an adjudicator. Clause 5 makes it clear that he is there in the capacity of a sort of Official Solicitor to give advice on how to present a complaint and to assist with it. I do not envisage his having a role in telling someone whether he may pursue his complaint for a right of reply. I think that the intervention was somewhat misplaced.
The right of reply will exist and it will be for the person who makes the complaint to prove that a factual inaccuracy has occurred that has damaged his good standing. If the commission rejects his complaint, although he has had the advice of the right of reply adviser, he would still be at liberty to pursue an appeal. The right of appeal should not be fettered in any way. Perhaps my hon. Friend is thinking of the need for leave to take a case to the House of Lords. This appeals procedure would not work in that way. A complainant, whether a member of the public or a newspaper, will have an absolute right to appeal to the appeals tribunal. Nothing should fetter that right and nothing does fetter that right as the new clause is drafted.
I would expect the rules to provide that, where a frivolous appeal was pursued, there would be power to order costs.

Mr. Stevens: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Knight: I want to draw my remarks to a close, but I give way for the last time.

Mr. Stevens: My hon. Friend is talking about factual inaccuracies. The Bill seems to be limited to factual inaccuracies, but part of the problem may be an omission. Selective reporting of facts or a speech causes the same difficulties, but my hon. Friend does not seem to cover that.

Mr. Knight: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He has pinpointed a defect in the Bill. An omission could not be called a factual inaccuracy, so there would be no right of complaint.
This is a bad Bill and I should like to see it defeated, but if we must have it there should be a right of appeal in it. Surely that is reasonable. I hope that the House will reject amendments Nos. 33, 91 and 100. Resort to the courts is superficially attractive, but it would be too slow and too costly. If we include an appeals procedure, the appeals tribunal would specialise and would gain expert knowledge of the matters relating to the Bill. As I said at the outset, I hope that the tribunal will be composed of people with a genuine interest in seeing a healthy press.
I hope that the House will support my new clause, which is reasonable. I notice that the promoter had the good grace at the outset to accept this change, so I hope that we shall not divide and that the House will accept the new clause.

Mr. Worthington: This morning it has been disappointing to see the tactics used by the opponents of the Bill. Many people are sick of the excesses perpetrated by some sections of the press and look to the House to tackle the


issue seriously. It is most disappointing that those who are being obstructive are acting on behalf of people who are virtually journalistic thugs.

Mr. Batiste: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Worthington: I will not play the same games as the hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight). I want to advance the debate.
I freely accept that there could be a good case for introducing an appeals procedure. What is most important is that the procedure is quick and deals with relatively simple issues. The Bill provides redress for factual inaccuracies in order to deal with some of the excesses.
I am aware of the risks of interfering with press freedom, but if the press lie, that is a diminution of freedom. If someone with a megaphone shouts, his view will be heard and the person with only his own voice will be drowned out. Rupert Murdoch with a megaphone would be a menace, but Rupert Murdoch in control of large sections of the press is a considerable threat to freedom.

Mr. Batiste: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman has made it clear that he does not intend to take interventions during his speech, as is his right. That being the case, many of us may wish to make speeches in order to deal with points that might otherwise have been dealt with in questions to him. I sincerely hope that in those circumstances, Mr. Deputy Speaker, should any requests be made to you by the sponsors of the Bill artificially to terminate the debate, you will bear that point in mind.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: The whole House knows that the Chair does not anticipate hypothetical situations.

Mr. Worthington: I am grateful, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
The issue of freedom is important. The Bill is centrally concerned with the wrongful exercise of power by the press, but it is my belief that, if we could lay down a yardstick or a benchmark of accuracy, many of the other faults—perhaps of distortion or of bullying—could also be dealt with. Almost every story about which people have complained has had within it that essence of inaccuracy.
I know full well that the Bill does not tackle everything that is wrong with the press at present. That is why I hope that during the debate Conservative Members will allow the Minister to speak, but by their tactics they are denying the Minister that opportunity. I hope that the Minister will respond to what has been the great success of the Bill, which is that it has brought the issue of press abuse of power into the centre of politics. Conservative Members who have spoken are aligning themselves with some very dubious characters, who are abusing their constituents, who are at present subject to the unfettered use of power. The disgraceful thing is that this country is supposed to be a democracy, but, to me, democracy means equality before the law. A feudal state is one in which there are different laws for different classes of people. When it comes to defamation and abuse of the people we have a feudal state, because there is no chance of the ordinary person getting redress from the law. The Minister and Conservative Members have ignored that. Conservative Members have not attempted in this Bill, or at any other time, to address that fundamental denial of civil liberties.

Mr. Waller: rose—

Mr. Worthington: I shall not give way. It is time for Conservative Members to listen. [HON. MEMBERS: "What about our right of reply?"] The right of reply will come to Conservative Members in due course.
What Conservative Members are ignoring and are giving no appeal against are the kinds of abuse that have been occurring in recent years. In recent times we have heard a lot about how there should be investigative journalism. I would accept that fully, but one of the things that has not happened is investigative journalism by the press of the press. There has been a concealing of some of the outrages that have occurred. One can take as an example the tragic case of Russell Harty. When he was on his death bed window cleaners were being bribed so that cameramen could take pictures of what was happening.

Mr. Roger King: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) is giving us his views on why we should pass his Right of Reply Bill today, but, in fact, we are debating new clause 4, which is about a press commission appeal tribunal. The hon. Gentleman's points have nothing to do with the new clause. I should have thought that, having heard my hon. Friend from Derby, North (Mr. Knight) and if he approves of the clause, he would be anxious to conclude.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman is the promoter of the Bill. I am giving him the opportunity to paint the picture before he comes to the new clause, which I am sure he is about to do.

Mr. Leigh: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) dealt specifically with the new clause, which concerns a narrow issue, and much of the debate has been about the legal implications. What we have now is a crude attempt by the promoter of the Bill to get into the tabloid press by talking about Russell Harty. Are we to have a serious debate on the new clause or not?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I have given the hon. Gentleman a hint, and I am sure that he is now about to come to the new clause.

Mr. Worthington: I am trying to establish why, in the kind of cases we are dealing with, a right of reply to a matter of factual inaccuracy is important, why we do not have that right at present and why we accept the case for there to be an appeal within the framework of the press commission. We should look at the kinds of cases that have occurred and see that behind them is the fundamental issue of inaccuracy. I was referring to the case of Mr. Russell Harty, when window cleaners were bribed to allow photographs to be taken of a ward, attempts were made to steal doctors' records, there were impersonations of doctors and nurses and there was a hounding of suffering relatives and friends. Conservative Members are defending people who take such action. They are failing to set up a procedure, through the press commission, that would allow an appeal against such press behaviour.

Mr. Batiste: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman brings it on his own head, because he will not give way. The hon. Gentleman appears to be speaking to an entirely different Bill from the one that I have in front of me. I wonder whether there has


been a procedural error and he has a different document. None of the circumstances he has mentioned is relevant to the Bill in front of us.

Mr. Flannery: rose—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I hope that the House will leave matters of order to the Chair. The hon. Gentleman is now addressing himself to the new clause.

Mr. Flannery: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for Elmet (Mr. Batiste) has intervened repeatedly, as, indeed, have other Conservative Members. They are filibustering. They are trying to stop the democratic procedure in the Chamber by hounding my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington), who has introduced the Bill. That is entirely in line with the way in which Conservative Members are defending the people who own the press.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. What has been said so far is in order. It is my job to ensure that the rules of order are observed. The hon. Gentleman has assured me that he is about to address his remarks more closely to the new clause.

Mr. Worthington: Once again, I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Certainly, I want to demonstrate why I think we should have, as the new clause proposes, a better appeals procedure. The Press Council, which is the present appeals procedure, is inadequate because its methods are extremely faulty. What I am proposing—aligned with the proposal of the hon. Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight}—would be infinitely better. At present, about 1,700 or 1,800 appeals against press misconduct go to the Press Council each year and of those about 4 or 5 per cent. are upheld. About 850 to 900 simply disappear each year, because people see that there is no point in taking their cases to a body that is so steered towards the needs of the press. A press commission would be a much fairer and more open system of appeal. I am happy to add to that proposal the further tier proposed by the hon. Member for Derby, North. When one considers the kind of bias that is implicit in the Press Council's judgments, it is clear that we must have a better system of appeal.
One Press Council judgment, which I cited to the Committee, illustrates the need for a better system of appeal. A school felt that it had been abused by a local newspaper and the head teacher refused to talk to the paper because her experience was that its reporters distorted what she said. The Press Council judgment, against which there is no appeal, stated:
the Press Council deplores the practice of some schools, education authorities and local authorities in refusing to speak to particular newspapers or answer their inquiries. Organisations which do so have little ground for serious complaint if inaccuracies are published in good faith as a result of their absence.
In other words, if someone's experience is that a paper distorts what he has said and he therefore decides not to speak to that paper, any subsequent inaccuracies are his fault. That is an outrage. There is no appeal against such judgments and that is why we need a less biased approach.
Another example of the present lack of appeal procedures and the biased practices of the Press Council may amuse some hon. Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Leith (Mr. Brown) appealed to the Press Council about an article in the Sunday Express, which said:
Three times in the previous 14 days Mr. Brown, Labour MP for Leith, telephoned the home of Chris Moncrieff, political editor of the Press Association. Each time he reversed the charges from Kabul in Afghanistan at £9.37 a time. Twice Mr. Moncrieff was out and his wife answered, but the third time Mr. Brown got through. He asked Mr. Moncrieff to tell the Labour Whips the weather was bad in Afghanistan and that he might not be back in time for Monday's vote on the Scottish Housing Bill. Mr. Moncrieff was as speechless as he must now be penniless.
My hon. Friend the Member for Leith legitimately appealed against that press story on the grounds that he had not reversed telephone charges three times from Kabul. The Press Council, however, found against him and upheld the report. It was only because my hon. Friend forced the Press Council to reconsider its decision and forced Mr. Moncrieff to produce his telephone bill, which showed no report of any reversed charges from Kabul, that his appeal was upheld. Currently, there is no right of appeal on a Press Council decision, but somehow my hon. Friend got his case reopened. It is necessary to have a right of appeal in such cases.

Mr. Waller: rose—

Mr. Worthington: I shall give way just to give myself a breather.

Mr. Waller: The hon. Gentleman has quoted from the Press Council report. It is clear from that report that only 10 per cent. of complaints relate to matters of accuracy. The hon. Gentleman said that most cases have something to do with inaccuracy, but that is not correct, because far more cases refer to matters of taste and decency.

Mr. Worthington: For the past few months I have gone through the annual reports of the Press Council. I have only been able to look at a limited number of adjudications and in the majority of cases it is clear that the press report has been built upon inaccuracy. From that basis issues of distortion, taste and privacy follow.
If I had introduced a Bill that gave a right of reply on reports relating to distortion, taste and so on as well as inaccuracy, Conservative Members would have said that it was unworkable. I believe that things have reached such a state in the press that it is necessary to demand that the press be accurate—that is a minimal demand. If the press is not accurate, there should be a statutory right of reply, because, at present, the press has gone too far.
Because of the present inadequate system it is necessary to establish a press commission and an appeals procedure. The Government have asked us to trust the Press Council to reform itself. The very people who have stood by while press standards have plummeted are now to be entrusted with the job of pulling the press up by its boot straps. I have immense respect for Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper, but even he is rather daunted by the messianic powers that are now being attributed to him.
It is regrettable that the representatives of the press proprietors have not given the type of undertakings that would make it possible to withdraw the Bill. What have we heard from News International? There is an interesting


leader in The Daily Telegraph of this morning which says that standards of modern journalism rest overwhelmingly in one or two people's hands:
Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Maxwell, who own most—though not quite all—of the newspapers which give rise to most offence, could change the scene tomorrow, if they chose. The power lies with them.
Mr. P. Rack is the representative of News of the World and News International on the Press Council, but what has he said about what that group will do in future to ensure the achievement of higher standards? He has said absolutely nothing. There is no credibility in the belief that the Press Council will be able to reform itself, because we have had no such undertakings from our major newspapers. The most cynical thing that has happened recently has been the appointment of an ombudsman by The Sun—he is its managing editor. Some of my hon. Friends may think that that is a joke, but it is no joke because that man represented The Sun when the Press Council investigated the infamous Ealing rape case story.

Mr. John Browne: rose—

Mr. Worthington: No, I will not give way.
What happened with the Ealing rape case demonstrates why it is necessary to have a better appeals procedure. The Press Council said:
four days after the attack, this front view full length, photograph occupied three full columns on the front page. It showed her leaving church after a service the previous day. On the photograph her features had been obscured by a black line or label masking the eyes. The story with it began by identifying but not naming her and went on
`raped in her home prayed yesterday'
Its second paragraph described her as a pretty, dark-haired girl, identified the vicar's church precisely, and defined their relationship.

Mr. Greg Knight: It was accurate, then.

Mr. Worthington: I will come to that point in a moment.
11.30 am
The managing editor of The Sun said
that the paper did not consider use of the picture tasteless and would not have published had it had thought so. Rape was a sordid and callous crime which The Sun believed it was its duty to present in a way that illustrated contempt for 'these savages'. The letter said that the picture was published to show the victim's 'ordinary, girl-next-door qualities'. It was never their intention to upset, annoy or cause offences to the victim or their readers, and if they had they were sorry.
That is what was said by The Sun's ombudsman. What undertaking has been given by its representatives on the Press Council that it will abide by the findings of the Press Council in the future? The Press Council's code on privacy is broken daily and repeatedly, and a reformed Press Council would be acting on that. Intrusions into privacy occur every day in the press. There must be a better system than the Press Council, which cannot deliver: there must be an appeal procedure.
The Government's silence on the issue has been disturbing. As a result, abuses of people in the press have been allowed. A fortnight ago a leaked report appeared in two newspapers, The Guardian and The Independent:
Minister backs press law review".
The Minister, to his credit, admits that the tabloid journals have reached a very low level. But two weeks ago he was considering a comprehensive review of press law, including such issues as right of reply, confidentiality, defamation, the abuse of press power and other matters that currently

concern us. It was wrong of him to leak that to the press, and I hope that he will now make a statement about the Government's present proposals.

Mr. Renton: The silence of the Government is about to be broken yet again.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Knight) on the eloquent way in which he spoke to new clause 4. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Elmet (Mr. Batiste), for Slough (Mr. Watts), for Birmingham, Northfield (Mr. King) and for Nuneaton (Mr. Stevens) for their useful interventions, which, I think, helped my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North to elaborate on a number of points. It is a pity that the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) did not include the idea of an appeals tribunal in the first draft of his Bill, but we have had a useful discussion about it this morning.
My hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North talked about "misunderstood Ministers". I should confess that I have a personal interest in ensuring that the Bill, however flawed I may think it, passes into law. I was promoted from Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to Minister of State some four years ago. The next day I picked up The Times expecting to read a glowing description of this meteoric rise in my career, the Prime Minister's perceptiveness in promoting me, and so forth. The larger part of the article about my promotion, however, concentrated on the fact that I had once portrayed Great-Uncle Bulgaria in "The Wombles of Wimbledon Common".
Unfortunately, The Times had got the wrong Tim Renton. I was never Great-Uncle Bulgaria in "The Wombles of Wimbledon Common". I therefore telephoned Julian Haviland, whom many of us remember as an extremely good, unbiased political editor of The Times, and told him what had happened, in tones of great indignation. He was extremely apologetic and assured me that the matter would be put right. Sure enough, the next day, tucked away at the bottom of page 23 or 27, was a tiny passage of three lines, saying something like "The report of Mr. Renton's career in the pop industry was inaccurate."
Under the Bill, I would have had an obvious claim to take to the press commission. I decided, in fact, that what the paper had said was not damaging to my career; indeed, I thought that it probably enhanced my prospects. There was, however, a sidelight. Among my new responsibilities at the Foreign Office was the post of Minister with duties relating to Hong Kong.
Those in Hong Kong always regard the Minister involved simply as "their man": he is the Hong Kong Minister. Some weeks later I discovered that papers such as the South China Morning Post had run headlines stating "New Hong Kong Minister ex-pop star". Perhaps they went even further and stated "Ex-Great-Uncle Bulgaria new Hong Kong Minister"—which must have puzzled the Chinese a good deal.
Moreover—here is the rub—the Hong Kong papers never noticed the tiny correction in The Times. Throughout the two years for which I had responsibility for Hong Kong, it was assumed that I was, indeed, an ex-Great-Uncle Bulgaria. That may have caused some of the difficulties in the subsequent relations between the United Kingdom Government and Hong Kong: I do not know. Clearly, however, I had a good case for the press commission, and one that could go to the appeals tribunal


suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North—and what a lovely can of worms that would have opened.
My hon. Friend argued his case very well. As has been pointed out, one of my other responsibilities at the Home Office is immigration and nationality. In that context, there is an extensive system of appeals, run not by the Home Secretary but by the Lord Chancellor. Decisions made by the immigration authorities can, as we know, have a profound effect on individuals and their families, and for that reason it was considered appropriate to introduce and continue an appeals framework.
It could be argued that decisions made following a complaint to the Press Council also have a profound effect on the lives of individuals, families and organisations. I can well understand that, given the potential importance of the council's decisions, an appeals machinery to review such decisions would be appropriate.
Let me give an example from immigration records to illustrate why the appeals tribunal is so helpful. It is an instance of fact blurring into interpretations of an event by parties who are in disagreement. A Member of Parliament rings my office and complains that a young lady carrying certificates of hairdressing qualifications has been refused entry as a visitor at the airport. The immigration officer has decided, on the basis of the certificates, that she has come to this country not as a visitor but to work. The Member of Parliament has been told, however, that the certificates are simply being carried by a visiting relative to be proudly displayed to her hosts as proof of her qualifications in the country from which she has come. That is just the sort of case in which an immigration appeals tribunal that could have a further and second look at the executive decisions of immigration officers can be a valuable safeguard.

Mr. Harry Cohen: rose—

Mr. Renton: I see the hon. Member rising to his feet and I know that he wants to ask me a question about the immigration appeals tribunal. I would much rather get on and talk about the press, but I shall give way.

Mr. Cohen: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. The kind of appeals tribunal to which the Minister refers would be absolutely worthless. In the case to which he referred the girl would be deported. The Minister would not interfere with the immigration officer's decision. She could appeal only in the country from which she came. The procedure that the Minister wants to include in the Bill would be useless.

Mr. Renton: The hon. Gentleman's Pavlovian reaction to my remark was exactly the one that I had expected. The appeals tribunal's function is to review Home Office decisions. It is no longer the duty of Ministers to interfere with those decisions. That change has been widely welcomed by a large majority of hon. Members.
I do not intend to elaborate on the rules that might support the appeals tribunal. If my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North cares to write to me about it, should the matter progress further, we could then look carefully together at the rules.
I share the general approval, expressed in the Chamber and in Committee, of the good-humoured manner in

which the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie has approached this difficult subject. His good humour seemed to be in danger of cracking for a few minutes this morning, but he quickly re-established his normal equilibrium. I wholly understand and sympathise with the concern that has been expressed about the excesses of the national press, particularly the tabloid press. There is worry about doorstepping, intrusion into people's private lives, persistent trick questioning, the taking of secret photographs and the harassment of ordinary people, especially at times of distress when they are least able to cope. The hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie said that lots of people were sick about the way in which the press behave. I agree. However, despite the deliberations in Committee, the Bill is still fundamentally flawed.
The hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie praised the new chairman of the Press Council, Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper. I remind him of the first paragraph of an article in The Times today that was written by Mr. Blom-Cooper. It says:
The nuts and bolts of the Right of Reply Bill have been widely demonstrated to be utterly impracticable — The proposed legislation is also fundamentally flawed, however, in seeking for the first time to regulate the content of a newspaper by law.
There is no point in the hon. Gentleman praying in aid the chairman of the Press Council as a supporter of the Bill. He is not. He regards the Bill as fundamentally flawed. Even the National Union of Journalists believes that it is flawed. [Interruption.] What a pity that the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore), who is a member of the National Union of Journalists and who was here earlier, has left the Chamber. The hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) should know that the NUJ has said that it is determined to regain membership of the Press Council as part and parcel of that more effective structure that Mr. Blom-Cooper is trying to organise. I should have thought that Opposition Members would welcome that development.

Mr. Wilson: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Renton: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will allow me to finish this point.
The NUJ considers that the Bill is flawed. It may believe in a statutory right of reply but it has made it abundantly plain that it does not consider that this Bill is the right vehicle for it.

Mr. Wilson: Many NUJ members, including me, do not wish to be protected if we pursue mendacity. All that the Bill does is to remove the right to make factual inaccuracies—in many cases very hurtful and damaging inaccuracies. That is not a press freedom which I or any other responsible journalist wishes to maintain.

Mr. Renton: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has raised that point. It leads me to exactly the next point that I want to make.
The Bill would certainly allow a correction to be enforced legally where necessary. However, let us examine the point more closely. The Bill's title is somewhat misleading. It does not create a right of reply. Such a term implies a right for an individual to state his case or to respond to published material—factual or not, inaccurate or not—in the same publication.
What, however, does the Bill offer? It creates a right to correct inaccurate statements of fact in published material,


provided that the complainant can establish first, that the material was factually inaccurate, secondly, that the factual inaccuracy affected him personally and, thirdly, that any reasonable person might deem that inaccuracy to be damaging to his character, reputation or good standing —in other words, that it is defamatory.
11.45 am
Even leaving aside the notorious difficulty of drawing a clear line between fact, comment and opinion and the further problem of proving that a statement of fact is inaccurate and defamatory, it seems to me that the Bill will eventually only allow a satisfactory reply to unfair reporting in a small number of cases.

Mr. Bruce Grocott: Can the Minister explain the constantly recurring problem of what is and what is not fact, which we can all understand causes difficulty? He, as a Home Office Minister, is responsible for, among other things, all the Broadcasting Acts, which lay down specifically that responsibility must be taken for factual accuracy. That is spelt out in the programme guidelines throughout the broadcasting media. How is it possible for the Minister, who is responsible for regulations that make for better broadcasting standards, to say that they are inapplicable to the press?

Mr. Renton: The hon. Gentleman destroys his own case. There is much discussion and criticism now of broadcast documentaries that have acquired the name of "faction" because they are a mix of fact and fiction. Many people believe that that is a bad trend within many reportedly factual documentaries.

Mr. Grocott: rose—

Mr. Renton: I think that I should make progress. There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss broadcasting on other days.
I want to take up the point about the dividing line between fact, comment and opinion. If, for example, we become involved in a legal suit, we believe that the facts are all on our side. The other side believes that the facts are all on its side. There is no agreement about where the facts lie. As to the borderline between fact and opinion, if the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Grocott) went into a restaurant and said afterwards—and it was reported in the press—"The food was not fresh and the service was awful", would that be fact or opinion? [HON. MEMBERS: "Opinion."] Others would say that it was fact.

Mr. Grocott: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Robert N. Wareing: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Renton: No. We went into this matter in great detail in Committee. There is a borderline between fact, comment and opinion.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Mr. Renton: I shall give way to the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie.

Mr. Worthington: The Broadcasting Act 1981 set up the Broadcasting Complaints Commission. The commission was given responsibility to stop unwarranted intrusions into privacy. However, that responsibility was not defined. If the Minister can give the Broadcasting Complaints

Commission such a difficult concept to deal with, why would it not be possible for a press commission to deal with the much simpler issue of fact?

Mr. Renton: I am very well aware of the Broadcasting Complaints commission and its terms of reference. If the Bill sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Mr. Browne) is considered by the House on Report, we shall have the opportunity to discuss privacy. Today we are discussing neither broadcasting nor privacy, but the inaccurate reporting of facts.

Mr. Tebbit: We have had a perfect example of the difficulties about facts this morning when the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) referred to Mr. Chris Moncrieff of the Press Association. Since then I have received a letter from Mr. Moncrieff, who is my constituent, saying that there was some difficulty over the facts because, most notably, the hon. Gentleman did not mention that the disputed telephone calls in the anecdote did not appear on Mr. Moncrielfs telephone bill because his wife did not accept the request for a reverse-charge call. Having read all the accounts of these matters, the hon. Gentleman should have been fair to a journalist.

Mr. Renton: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is a precise example of misreporting when one part of the story is carefully left out in order to make a point. It is precisely the sort of nightmare that the Bill would produce.

Mr. Worthington: rose—

Mr. Renton: I shall gladly give way to the hon. Gentleman as it is his Bill, but then I must make progress.

Mr. Worthington: How is it possible for the allegation to be made that my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Leith (Mr. Brown) reversed the charges from Kabul in Afghanistan at £9·37 a time? How would one know the amount of money?

Mr. Renton: I do not think that I am responsible for the activities of the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Leith (Mr. Brown). In my days at the Foreign Office, when the hon. Member for Leith moved on from his regular questions about Afghanistan to a question about Albania, I remember congratulating him on making progress down the alphabet, but I do not think that I have any responsibility for his bills. The hon. Gentleman may wish to raise the matter on an Adjournment debate, as clearly it is a matter worth pursuing.
We have briefly discussed the press commission. I consider that it would be another quango with no fewer than 21 members on it. What a nightmare of bureaucracy is in prospect with all 21 members having to see all the papers and all the complaints and doubtless having to agree unanimously on the outcome of each complaint within 28 days of receiving the complaint. And what at the end of the day about the Press Council? Will it fade into the distance and beyond? We have heard a great deal of criticism of the Press Council.

Mr. Joseph Ashton: Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Renton: The hon. Member for Bassetlaw (M r. Ashton), who was a member of the Standing Committee, must let me develop the point a little further.
Many hon. Members on both sides of the House would welcome the disappearance of the Press Council, but they forget that it has other important functions such as to preserve the established freedom of the press and to make representations to the Government on appropriate occasions. How will the press commission interact with the Press Council? I asked the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie that question in Committee, but I never received an understandable reply. Confusion is bound to occur in the relationship between the Press Council and the press commission.

Mr. Ashton: The Minister reads his brief and confuses question and comment. Will he make it perfectly clear whether he is speaking for himself or for the Government?

Mr. Renton: I am pleased to say that the Government and I are as one on this issue—and that is most satisfactory. As I have said before—and the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Ashton) heard me speak about this in Committee and will not be surprised by anything I say —my deepest objection to the principle of the Bill is that it intrudes on the freedom of the press. It introduces a measure of Government control over the press, and who can say what would follow, once one statutory measure had been introduced? We have not had statutory control of the press in Britain since the days of Cromwell in the 17th century.

Mr. John Browne: My hon. Friend has said that if the Bill were passed it would intrude on the rights of the press. He is really saying that it would intrude on the rights of the press to bully individual people and that is the whole question. He places reliance on the Press Council, whose members are very hard-working people, but they have no teeth, and of course they lack credibility. He talks about ombudsmen, but they are seen not as ombudsmen but as "ombudsmice". What the House and the Bill are trying to do is to protect the individual person with ombudsmen —something with teeth.

Mr. Renton: I heard the phrase "not ombudsmen but ombudsmice" for the first time two days ago in the Committee considering my hon. Friend's Bill. It is a nice turn of phrase, but he does less than justice to the new chairman of the Press Council, Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper, who is clearly determined to prove its effectiveness and continues to believe, as I do, in the system of self-regulation of the press. I am very pleased to note the warning given by Mr. Blom-Cooper in his foreword to the recent report of the Press Council:
Much more should and will be expected from all those in and out of the Press Council who have an abiding interest in ensuring that an independent, self-regulatory body should succeed in averting statutory intervention.
That is at the heart of the matter. Evidence of the new intent and purpose of the Press Council is clear from its speedy announcement this week to investigate the propriety of the photographic coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, which has been mentioned this morning. We should all approve of the Press Council acting so quickly to examine the propriety of publishing those photographs.

Mr. Mark Fisher: How will the Minister's announced review of press law address the

question raised by hon. Members on both sides of the House about the abuses of factual inaccuracies in the press? Does he intend that his review will cover that, and how will it address that point?

Mr. Renton: Despite all his persuasive skills, the hon. Gentleman must allow me to make my own speech in my own way and in the order that I choose.
It is my very strong view that, despite the lack of action and the feeling of apathy in the Press Council in recent years, we should not undermine its determination to bring about fundamental change.

Mr. John Browne: rose—

Mr. Renton: With all respect to my hon. Friend, I have give way generously and others wish to speak.
Nor do I think we should lightly jettison the commitment and good will which all sections of the press are showing to the Press Council.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie on what he has achieved, not only in bringing his Bill to Report today, but because his Right of Reply Bill has woken up newspaper proprietors, publishers and editors to extent of concern that they have not shown for years. The heavies have thundered against him from Wapping, the Isle of Dogs, Southwark bridge and Chelsea bridge. They have all been telling us about the inadequacies of his Bill. The local newspapers have written to us in the same vein. I have received two letters from two newspapers printed in my constituency pointing out the errors of the Bill and very politely asking me to try and be present in the House today. I received the same message from my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. The hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie has even had the honour of a long and wordy article written by Bernard Levin in The Times. That article is as prolix, complex and emotional as any criticism by Mr. Levin of a bad performance of the Ring Cycle.
Editors and publishers are steamed up. They have been made thoroughly aware of the proper, correct and understandable anxieties of many hon. Members.

Mr. Austin Mitchell: Will the Minister give way?

12 noon

Mr. Renton: I did not give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester, so I shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman.
The editors and publishers are, to put it crudely, in a lather and the pressure must not go away. As Members of Parliament we must ensure that editors and journalists, such as the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell)—it is good that he has left Sky television to join us today—

Mr. Mitchell: Will the Minister give way now?

Mr. Renton: Since I named the hon. Gentleman, I shall give way.

Mr. Mitchell: The Minister said that there were monstrous abuses by the press and that the Bill was flawed. In those circumstances, the honest and honourable course would be not to praise the Bill with faint damns and postpone everything unto the ides of Blom-Cooper and certainly not to go along with the monstrous conspiracy of the lackeys and lickspittles of the Fleet street magnates on


the Conservative Benches and filibuster against the Bill, but to provide Government time either to improve the Bill or introduce his own measure.

Mr. Renton: The hon. Gentleman has now achieved his 30 seconds on television tonight. Why is it that one is a lackey and a lickspittle if one writes for The Times but not if one appears on Sky television, which is also part of the Murdoch empire? Perhaps he can tell us where the precise line of definition lies.—[Interruption.] I have appeared on Sky television with the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and it was great fun. I recommend it to the House.
If, by any chance, the Bill does not receive its Third Reading, the editors and publishers of the national press in Britain are on probation—[Laughter.] They have a year or two in which to clean up their act. If they succeed—I hope that they will—effective, quick and fair self-regulation that protects the position and rights of the private individual and the small man who cannot look after himself very well will remain the order of the day. That will happen without statutory control of the press. If not, Parliament will certainly return to this issue. For that reason and on raising the temperature of the debate I congratulate the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie and my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester.
There is a better way out of the difficulties that would be created by the Bill and by the Protection of Privacy Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester. Those difficulties have dominated our debate so far today and they dominated our proceedings in Committee. Therefore, it is right that I should let the House know that the Government have decided that there should be a review of the general issue of privacy and related matters —areas with which both Bills are concerned. The review will be conducted outside Government and will aim to report to the Home Secretary within a year.

Mr. Ashton: Who will carry out the review?

Mr. Renton: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman asked me that question from a sedentary position.
Decisions have still to be taken on who should be invited to chair the review and the precise terms of reference. A formal announcement will be made in due course. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester will regard that as a positive step.

Mr. John Browne: rose—

Mr. Renton: I will not give way to my hon. Friend.
The review is designed to deal with the problems that have correctly and understandably concerned hon. Members on both sides of the House and I trust that it will be widely welcomed.

Mr. Mark Fisher: People outside the House will be surprised and depressed by the fact that the new clause, which we have been debating for two and half hours, was accepted by my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) at the beginning of the debate. They will find it surprising that the Minister, by speaking for over half an hour, has indirectly associated himself and the Government with the filibuster that has prevented the serious points that have been raised both inside and outside the House from being raised. When the Minister said that he hoped the Bill receive a Third Reading—

Mr. Renton: I did not say that.

Mr. Fisher: He said that he hoped that we would proceed to a Third Reading. His behaviour this morning makes that difficult.
Once again we have seen a confused stance by the Government. They did not vote against the Bill on Second Reading and they did not seek to vote against any of the amendments in Committee. They have remained passive. Yet we understand from the press that over the past few weeks, by whispering and making unofficial leaks to the press, the Government have made it clear that they are now opposed to the Bill. They would have done themselves and the debate a greater service by playing a more active role in the Second Reading and Committee stages.
The Government and hon. Members on both sides of the House know that over the past few years there has been a growing number of abuses, as identified by my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie. The Press Council's annual report for the past few years has revealed an increase in abuses by certain sectors of the press. Opposition Members accept that the regional press and the free press do not indulge in those tactics. We know that we are talking about only a small section of the press. However, the damage that can be done to people's lives, marriages, relationships and prospects is grave. If hon. Members who have sought to speak at great length this morning do not recognise the seriousness of that offence and the depth of feeling in the country, they are mistaking the mood of the House and the country.

Mr. Wilson: Does my hon. Friend agree that a test of press freedom in this country will be to see how many newspapers tomorrow list the small bunch of Tories who have done the dirty work today and filibustered during this debate?

Mr. Fisher: I agree with my hon. Friend. It will be surprising to see that list.
I am delighted that the Minister has now explained to the House, at least in principle, the review that he intends to put in train. In the absence of the Government's support for this legislation, that will be widely welcomed.

Mr. John Browne: Does the hon. Gentleman remember that, although the Government have announced a review, that is exactly what happened when the late Lord Mancroft introduced his privacy Bill and when Mr. Alex Lyon and Mr. Brian Walden did the same? The Younger committee reported in 1972 and since then the situation has got worse and worse. All we shall have is the eyewash of yet another review.

Mr. Fisher: Because of the way in which they have approached this issue and the issue raised by the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Browne), the House will be looking closely at the Government when they deliver the review. It will want strong assurances about the terms of reference. I note that, when referring to the terms of reference of the review, the Minister mentioned privacy, which is of great interest to all people, but did not mention the right of reply. I hope that in setting the terms of the review he will specifically include that and other abuses and lay out clearly for the chairman exactly what the Government expect. I hope that the Minister will ensure that the membership of the review is wide-ranging and includes independent people who represent the views of the general public.
The Government's record on appointing bodies such as this is deplorable. Too often, Government appointments to such review bodies are extremely partial. I hope that on this occasion the Minister will ensure that a wide range of views is included in order to give it the credibility that the public require and that is necessary in view of the debate we have had over the past few weeks.
History will be on the side of the Bill, and we shall return to it next year. This is the fourth or fifth time this decade that an hon. Member has tried to introduce such legislation. We have moved further, thanks to the excellent work and advocacy of my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie. We have at last persuaded Ministers and hon. Members that this issue cannot and will not go away. The Government must recognise that and understand the seriousness of the problem.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie has done an excellent job over the past few weeks. He has shown clearly the seriousness of the abuses that have occurred. His anxieties have been echoed around the country. It is up to the Government, if they cannot support the Bill, to get on with the review, give a time limit for it, undertake that they will introduce legislation at the end of it and bring their recommendations before the House. The public will expect nothing less of the Government, and it is up to them to fulfil those expectations.

Mr. Rooker: In the interests of the little people against the lie sheets, I beg to move, That the Question be now put.

Question put, That the Question be now put:—

The House divided: Ayes 100, Noes 26.

Division No. 169]
[12.10 pm


AYES


Abbott, Ms Diane
Flannery, Martin


Aitken, Jonathan
Foster, Derek


Allen, Graham
Fraser, John


Ashton, Joe
Fyfe, Maria


Banks, Tony (Newham NW)
Garel-Jones, Tristan


Barnes, Harry (Derbyshire NE)
Garrett, John (Norwich South)


Battle, John
Golding, Mrs Llin


Bennett, A. F. (D'nt'n &amp; R'dish)
Greenway, Harry (Ealing N)


Boateng, Paul
Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)


Bray, Dr Jeremy
Grocott, Bruce


Brown, Michael (Brigg &amp; Cl't's)
Ground, Patrick


Brown, Nicholas (Newcastle E)
Hardy, Peter


Brown, Ron (Edinburgh Leith)
Holland, Stuart


Browne, John (Winchester)
Howarth, Alan (Strat'd-on-A)


Buchan, Norman
Hughes, John (Coventry NE)


Clay, Bob
Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)


Clelland, David
Irving, Charles


Clwyd, Mrs Ann
Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S W)


Cohen, Harry
Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald


Corbett, Robin
Leighton, Ron


Corbyn, Jeremy
McFall, John


Crowther, Stan
McKelvey, William


Cryer, Bob
Madden, Max


Cummings, John
Mahon, Mrs Alice


Davies, Ron (Caerphilly)
Malins, Humfrey


Davis, David (Boothferry)
Marek, Dr John


Davis, Terry (B'ham Hodge H'l)
Marlow, Tony


Dixon, Don
Martlew, Eric


Dobson, Frank
Meale, Alan


Doran, Frank
Mitchell, Austin (G't Grimsby)


Evans, John (St Helens N)
Morris, Rt Hon A. (W'shawe)


Ewing, Mrs Margaret (Moray)
Mowlam, Marjorie


Fallon, Michael
Murphy, Paul


Fearn, Ronald
Nellist, Dave


Field, Frank (Birkenhead)
Orme, Rt Hon Stanley


Fisher, Mark
Powell, Ray (Ogmore)



Quin, Ms Joyce
Thompson, Jack (Wansbeck)


Redmond, Martin
Townsend, Cyril D. (B'heath)


Renton, Tim
Tredinnick, David


Richardson, Jo
Vaz, Keith


Rooker, Jeff
Wall, Pat


Ruddock, Joan
Wardle, Charles (Bexhill)


Sedgemore, Brian
Wareing, Robert N.


Shaw, David (Dover)
Wilson, Brian


Shelton, Sir William
Winnick, David


Shersby, Michael
Wise, Mrs Audrey


Short, Clare
Worthington, Tony


Skinner, Dennis
Young, David (Bolton SE)


Spearing, Nigel



Squire, Robin
Tellers for the Ayes:


Stanbrook, Ivor
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody


Strang, Gavin
and Mr. George J. Buckley.


NOES


Ashton, Joe
Rathbone, Tim


Batiste, Spencer
Redwood, John


Boateng, Paul
Rhodes James, Robert


Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)
Smith, Tim (Beaconsfield)


Braine, Rt Hon Sir Bernard
Stevens, Lewis


Buck, Sir Antony
Tebbit, Rt Hon Norman


Budgen, Nicholas
Waddington, Rt Hon David


Field, Frank (Birkenhead)
Walden, George


Forth, Eric
Waller, Gary


Gow, Ian
Wheeler, John


King, Roger (B'ham N'thfield)
Wood, Timothy


Knapman, Roger



Lightbown, David
Tellers for the Noes:


Moynihan, Hon Colin
Mr. Greg Knight and


Raison, Rt Hon Timothy
Mr. John Watts.

Question accordingly agreed to.

Mr. Batiste: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I must proceed to put the Question.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time:—

The House proceeded to a Division:—

Mr. Watts: (seated and covered): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. In the Division, within the total of 100 in favour of the closure, one hon. Member was included who voted in both the Aye and the No Lobbies. In those circumstances, has the necessary total of 100 votes been cast in favour of the closure?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: That does not affect the numbers. It is always possible for an hon. Member to cancel his vote by going in to the other Lobby.

Mr. Tebbit: (seated and covered): Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I shall take the point of order when I have appointed the Tellers.

Mr. Tebbit: (seated and covered): Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You said correctly that an hon. Member may have voted in both Lobbies to cancel one vote. Have you ascertained whether he wished to cancel the vote that made the total up to 100 for the closure, or the other vote? If the former, surely the closure cannot be passed by the vote of an hon. Member opposed to it.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: The Division was carried out correctly. I have made inquiries, and I am satisfied of that.

Mr. Roger King: (seated and covered): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Is the point of order related to the Division? If not, I shall take it afterwards.

Mr. King: (seated and covered): It is a point of order concerning the Division, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am in some difficulty in deciding how to vote because I have only heard speeches in favour of the new clause. I have heard nothing—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman must not question the judgment of the Chair in accepting the closure.

The House having divided: Ayes 96, Noes 23.

Division No. 170]
[12.24 pm


AYES


Abbott, Ms Diane
Irving, Charles


Allen, Graham
Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S W)


Ashton, Joe
Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald


Banks, Tony (Newham NW)
Knight, Greg (Derby North)


Barnes, Harry (Derbyshire NE)
Leighton, Ron


Battle, John
Lestor, Joan (Eccles)


Bennett, A. F. (D'nt'n &amp; R'dish)
Lightbown, David


Boateng, Paul
McFall, John


Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)
McKelvey, William


Bray, Dr Jeremy
Madden, Max


Brown, Michael (Brigg &amp; Cl't's)
Mahon, Mrs Alice


Brown, Nicholas (Newcastle E)
Marek, Dr John


Brown, Ron (Edinburgh Leith)
Martlew, Eric


Browne, John (Winchester)
Meale, Alan


Buchan, Norman
Mitchell, Austin (G't Grimsby)


Budgen, Nicholas
Morris, Rt Hon A. (W'shawe)


Clay, Bob
Murphy, Paul


Clelland, David
Nellist, Dave


Clwyd, Mrs Ann
Orme, Rt Hon Stanley


Cohen, Harry
Powell, Ray (Ogmore)


Corbett, Robin
Redmond, Martin


Corbyn, Jeremy
Richardson, Jo


Crowther, Stan
Rooker, Jeff


Cryer, Bob
Ruddock, Joan


Cummings, John
Sedgemore, Brian


Davis, David (Boothferry)
Shersby, Michael


Davis, Terry (B'ham Hodge H'l)
Skinner, Dennis


Dixon, Don
Soley, Clive


Dobson, Frank
Spearing, Nigel


Evans, John (St Helens N)
Squire, Robin


Ewing, Mrs Margaret (Moray)
Stanbrook, Ivor


Fearn, Ronald
Stewart, Andy (Sherwood)


Field, Frank (Birkenhead)
Strang, Gavin


Fisher, Mark
Thompson, Jack (Wansbeck)


Flannery, Martin
Townsend, Cyril D. (B'heath)


Foster, Derek
Tredinnick, David


Fraser, John
Vaz, Keith


Fyfe, Maria
Waddington, Rt Hon David


Garrett, John (Norwich South)
Wall, Pat


Garrett, Ted (Wallsend)
Wardle, Charles (Bexhill)


Golding, Mrs Llin
Wareing, Robert N.


Greenway, Harry (Ealing N)
Wilson, Brian


Griffiths, Nigel (Edinburgh S)
Winnick, David


Grocott, Bruce
Wise, Mrs Audrey


Ground, Patrick
Worthington, Tony


Hardy, Peter
Young, David (Bolton SE)


Hattersley, Rt Hon Roy



Hoyle, Doug
Tellers for the Ayes:


Hughes, John (Coventry NE)
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody


Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)
and Mr. George J. Buckley.


NOES


Braine, Rt Hon Sir Bernard
Lawrence, Ivan


Davies, Ron (Caerphilly)
Redwood, John


Doran, Frank
Rhodes James, Robert


Forth, Eric
Short, Clare


Garel-Jones, Tristan
Smith, Tim (Beaconsfield)


Gow, Ian
Tebbit, Rt Hon Norman


Howarth, Alan (Strat'd-on-A)
Twinn, Dr Ian


Janman, Tim
Walden, George


King, Roger (B'ham N'thfield)
Waller, Gary


Knapman, Roger
Watts, John





Wheeler, John
Tellers for the Noes:


Widdecombe, Ann
Mr. Spencer Batiste and


Wood, Timothy
Mr. Lewis Stevens.

Question accordingly agreed to.

Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 5

COMMENCEMENT

`This Act shall come into force on such date as the Lord Chancellor shall by statutory instrument provide.'—[Mr. Gow.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Gow: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to take the following amendments: No. 77, in clause 2, page 2, line 2, after 'appointed', insert—
'(a) on the establishment of the Commission'.
No. 96, in page 2, line 2, leave out 'Secretary of State' and insert 'Lord Chancellor'.
No. 76, in page 2, line 2, after 'State', insert—
', and (b) in subsequent years by the Secretary of State and the Commission in equal numbers.'.
No. 84, in the schedule, page 4, line 17, leave out
'by the Secretary of State'.
No. 88, in page 4, line 23, leave out
'by the Secretary of State'.

Mr. Gow: Tomorrow we shall celebrate the anniversary of the birth of his late Majesty the Emperor of Japan. Hon. Members may wonder about the relevance of that anniversary to the debate. It is a question which has occurred to my hon. Friend the Comptroller of Her Majesty's Household, who is characteristically seated in his place. We noted that anniversary on an earlier occasion. Is it a matter of fact or a matter of opinion? The Bill is concerned with fact or opinion.
The new clause mentions the Lord Chancellor. It has been tabled for two reasons: first, to show my right hon. and hon. Friends' confidence in the Lord Chancellor—a confidence which, apparently, is not shared by all of Her Majesty's judges—and, secondly, to bring sense to the Bill. It is difficult to bring sense to the Bill. My hon. Friend the Minister, as diligent as ever in the performance of his duties, is still present. [Interruption.] The Comptroller of Her Majesty's Household laughs. My hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire, South-East (Mr. Lightbown) laughed. He has now ceased to laugh. He recognises the truth of that remark.
As I said, we need to bring some sense to the Bill. It is difficult to bring sense to the Bill. My hon. Friend the Minister read out to the House an article by Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper who, as the Comptroller of Her Majesty's Household knows, is one of Her Majesty's counsel. He has been appointed chairman of the Press Council. No better appointment to that important office has ever been made. I praise Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper. He is a lawyer of outstanding quality, and he has a sense of honour. I was surprised when some Opposition Members gave the impression that they had no confidence in Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper. [Interruption.] That was the impression.

Mr. Fisher: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Gow: A Wykehamist always gives way to an Etonian.

Mr. Fisher: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, wherever he was educated.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) has had to leave the Chamber. I make it clear on his behalf that, far from casting any aspersions on Mr. Blom-Cooper, my hon. Friend has gone out of his way, on Second Reading, in Committee and today, to pay tribute to him and to the reform of the Press Council that he is seeking. The fact that my hon. Friend considers that that work is likely to be doomed, because the Press Council is organised by those who control and own the press, is another matter. My hon. Friend's personal opinions of Mr. Blom-Cooper are clearly on record. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that and accept that no Opposition Member has cast any aspersions on Mr. Blom-Cooper.

Mr. Gow: I made the fairly innocent and, I thought, accurate remark that my hon. Friend the Minister and my right hon. and hon. Friends gained the impression that Opposition Members—other than the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie—do not think very highly of Mr. Blom-Cooper. My right hon. and hon. Friends are not shaking their heads and saying, "You have gone off your head, Gow." Instead of shaking their heads, they are nodding. The heads that are nodding do not belong to me but are those of my right hon. and hon. Friends. They are of age, and they can give their own indications.
I see on the Treasury Bench three Ministers—as will the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher) if he looks straight ahead. Whips are certainly Ministers—that is beyond dispute. Each of those three Ministers, chosen by the Prime Minister herself, agrees that the impression given by Opposition Members was that they do not have confidence in Mr. Blom-Cooper. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central is entitled to say that the wrong impression was given, but it is characteristic of the Labour party to give the wrong impression. It is always doing that.

Mr. Fisher: Without labouring the point, that matter will be resolved by reading the Official Report. Nothing on the record will show that my right hon. or hon. Friends gave such an impression. It might be that Conservative Members misinterpreted sedentary remarks, which can easily cause confusion. However, I suspect that nothing in the record of today's debate will bear out the impression gained by the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Gow). I am sure that he accepts that.

Mr. Gow: Certainly I agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is being so agreeable that I have even referred to him as "my hon. Friend." However, during the speech of my hon. Friend the Minister—and it was an excellent speech —he referred to the chairman of the Press Council. He was not ruled out by your immediate predecessor in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, because he was not out of order. When my hon. Friend the Minister made that remark, it was greeted with derisory laughter from the Opposition Benches. I am not inventing that incident. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Mr. Ground) agrees. It is not only lay right hon. and hon.

Friends who concur with my account. Not one of my right hon. or hon. Friends quarrels with what I say. That does not happen very often, but it has happened this morning.

Mr. Watts: Does my hon. Friend agree that the exchanges between him and the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher) illustrate one of the essential difficulties in the Bill? Even a matter so simple and matter of fact as what was said earlier in the Chamber can give rise to great controversy. Equally intelligent right hon. and hon. Members, listening to the same words, and seeing the same facial expressions, can arrive at wholly different conclusions as to the intentions behind words that were spoken.

Mr. Gow: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, who in former times was my Parliamentary Private Secretary. If I may so, he was excellent—and I hope very much that he will catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, because he has an important contribution to make to our proceedings.
I do not want to devote my speech only to the subject of Mr. Blom-Cooper, but I place on record that my right hon. and hon. Friends and I have great confidence in his ability, intelligence and sense of honour. I set out to put some sense into the Bill, but that is not easy.
I welcome the hon. Member for Newham, North-West (Mr. Banks) to our proceedings. Earlier, before you were in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, the hon. Gentleman was seated not where he is now, below the Gangway, but on the Opposition Front Bench. I hope that he will return there, because that is where he belongs.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Miss Betty Boothroyd): Order. I notice, however, that we have amendments before us and that the hon. Gentleman has had more than five minutes on his preamble. I should be grateful if he would relate his remarks to the amendments.

Mr. Gow: I shall give way to the hon. Member for Newham, North-West (Mr. Banks).

Mr. Tony Banks: I feel that I belong to the Front Bench through instinct and merit, but, unfortunately, not through office held.

Mr. Gow: It is a matter of deep regret to the whole House, but above all to him, that the hon. Gentleman is not seated on the Opposition Front Bench. Although the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Kinnock) does not share the high regard which I have for the hon. Gentleman, I have good news for the hon. Gentleman. The right hon. Gentleman will not be leading the Labour party after the next election. Then will come the time for rapid preferment for the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Tony Banks: I cannot say that I necesarily wish such a scenario to come about or that I share the hon. Gentleman's predictions. If my promotion is as rapid as he suggests, I hope that my demotion is not as rapid as his was.

Mr. Gow: As a matter of fact, I was not dismissed. I may have departed before I was dismissed, but I was not dismissed. That is a reasonable point to make.
New clause 5, which has been studied so carefully by the hon. Member for Newham, North-West, will put some sense into the Bill.

Mr. Greg Knight: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Gow: I am trying to make progress. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Mr. Browne) is now in his place, so I want to proceed.
New clause 5 provides that the Bill shall not become operative until a date selected by the Lord Chancellor. Why? My hon. Friend the Minister read out part of an excellent article by Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper. We cannot have the Bill becoming operational before we have set up the press commission. Does my hon. Friend understand that point? The Bill cannot become law until we have appointed 21 members of the press commission. I am sure that he agrees.
I want the Lord Chancellor to decide by statutory instrument when the date shall be. That is perfectly common procedure. It is commonplace for an Act of Parliament to include a date on which that Act shall take effect. The hon. Member for Newham, North-West agrees. We have no such clause in the Bill. That is why I have tabled new clause 5, which is supported by some of my hon. Friends.

Mr. Renton: I am following my hon. Friend's argument with rapt attention. I am hoping that he will explain why the Lord Chancellor, rather than my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, should give his seal of approval to the time when the Bill shall come into force. After all, the Home Secretary would appoint the members of the commission. Earlier this week he was quoted as saying that that would be a heavy task to which he was not greatly looking forward. I may not have quoted him exactly, but that was the message of his remarks. I am not wholly clear yet why the Lord Chancellor, rather than the Home Secretary, should trigger off the Act, but I am sure that my hon. Friend will soon enlighten me.

Mr. Gow: For the very reason to which I referred in an intervention before 10 o'clock this morning. The words "The Secretary of State" in a Bill do not mean only the Home Secretary; they mean any Secretary of State.
The point that I want to make in response to the Minister's intervention is that I have much greater confidence in my noble Friend the Lord Chancellor than I have in my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales. The Secretary of State for Wales has strange views about economic and monetary policy. He is one of those people who still do not understand what most of us already understand about economic and monetary policy. Even the right hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey) understood. He was the first Socialist monetarist.
The right hon. Member should take my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales for a long walk over the hills, and explain to him that, when the rate of growth of the supply of money and the rate of growth of the supply of goods and services get out of balance, the consequence is inflation. That is why we do not want the Secretary of State for Wales making the appointments. If one is unsound on an issue such as monetary policy, one's judgment can be affected dramatically in other ways.

Mr. Batiste: Can my hon. Friend help those of us who were concerned about the way in which the Bill appeared to be creating some Orwellian nightmare of a Ministry of Justice? Leaving aside the personalities in the various offices, but, looking purely at the comparison between, for example, the posts of Home Secretary and Lord

Chancellor and drawing upon my hon. Friend's unrivalled experience in the House and of the people who have held those offices in the past, does my hon. Friend believe that it is inherent in the various responsibilities of those two offices that the Lord Chancellor would be the better person to deal with those difficult issues?

Mr. Gow: My hon. Friend has made an important point. It was not only the views of the Secretary of State for Wales that made me put down the new clause. Why I seek massive support for the new clause is that my noble Friend the Lord Chancellor is under assault from the judges. When my noble Friend is under assault, we in this place can put down a marker to show our confidence in him. We have to appoint 21 members of the press commission, which is far too many and one of my amendments seeks to bring it down to five. My noble Friend deserves the confidence of the House in deciding when the Bill shall become operative. We want to show some of the judges, who have been criticising my noble Friend's proposals, that we back him. In the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken), we are giving him another job. My hon. Friend is well versed in all matters related to journalism. Indeed, he is a distinguished writer himself. I wish that he would write more frequently in the newspapers and speak mare frequently in this place.

Mr. Jonathan Aitken: I am longing to.

Mr. Gow: I shall give way to my hon. Friend.
One cannot allow the Bill to become operative on the day that it reaches the statute book, because those 21 folk must be in place. My hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, South would be a very good member of the press commission, but I am not volunteering him for that post. Certainly, we do not want the Secretary of State for Wales to be involved, because he is unsound on monetary policy.

Mr. Roger King: What about my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath)?

Mr. Gow: No, I shall not mention him any more.
The third and most important reason is that we want to show our confidence and trust in my noble Friend. I believe that it is a very uncontroversial new clause. It will be widely welcomed. I am sure that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central, who sits alone on the Opposition Front Bench, will welcome it warmly, but we shall receive no welcome from any representative of the Liberal party. We have noted that there has been an absence of any representative on the Liberal Benches even though the Liberal party is constantly proclaiming its concern about the press. It is a characteristic disgrace that there is no representative of the Liberal party here.

Mr. Wareing: I want to strike a serious note in relation to this subject.
Amendment No. 96 is of particular interest to me. When my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) introduced the Bill, it was with the serious intention of ensuring that the press commission, which he proposes to take the place of the inane, anachronistic and toothless tiger, the Press Council, should be accountable to the House of Commons.
If there is to be accountability to the elected House of this Parliament, there must be a Minister—in this case the Home Secretary—who should be responsible for


answering questions or listening to complaints and problems which hon. Members, elected by their constituents, raise on the Floor of the House.
If the press commission had been in place during the past week, I and other colleagues on the Labour Benches and, possibly on the Government Benches, would have been raising some of the matters that we have unfortunately had to see in the pornographic sections of the British press. I would have been able to say to the Home Secretary—I could not say it to the Lord Chancellor —that he should look at the creatures who were able, on Wednesday, to publish their filth on the front page of The Sun. Incidentally, that is the same newspaper which got one of its journalists to ring me up a couple of months ago when a Conservative Member suffered the misfortune of his wife's death. That journalist telephoned me on a Sunday and pried into the private life of that hon. Gentleman. I told that journalist to get off, get himself another job—this time a job with dignity. Nobody with any dignity would work for The Sun.
In my home town of Liverpool there is now a massive boycott of that newspaper, a boycott which I wholeheartedly support. I hope that people up and down the country who have read the filth in Rupert Murdoch's paper will in future say no to buying any newspapers from that stable, including The Times.
No one in this country should be permitted to own more than one newspaper. If the Minister and other Conservative Members believe what they say about competition, there should be competition in the press. It should be possible for other proprietors to publish newspapers so that a wide stratum of opinion is expressed in our national press.
When the Minister reviews the situation—he says that he intends to do so—it is important to take on board the feeling on the Labour Benches that the Home Secretary is the right Minister to be responsible for answering to the House.
I hope—I suppose it is a forlorn one—that my hon. Friend's Bill will become law during this Session. I have no doubt that the Bill will become law in the due process of time, because we shall return to this subject time and time again. I hope he will understand, however, that we must have a Minister in the House of Commons responsible for answering for any press commission—or, if my hon. Friend is unfortunate, for the Press Council.
The Press Council, as I have said, is a toothless tiger which came into existence in the 1940s. The Royal Commission on the press stated in 1948 that the regular diet of the British public on a Sunday was crime, sex and violence; that has not changed after 40 years of the Press Council. Now we need a body with real teeth to take up the complaints that we bring to the House—even, perhaps, complaints about hon. Members who give quotes to the national press rather than raising points in the House.
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On Monday the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Patnick) was called by Mr. Speaker to question the Home Secretary following his statement about the Hillsborough disaster. I have not seen the hon. Gentleman here since. If he had been here, it might have been possible to persuade him to raise in the House points that we could then have contested.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are dealing with a new clause that is fairly specific. I should be obliged if he would direct his comments towards it.

Mr. Wareing: I am trying to make the point, Madam Deputy Speaker, that amendment No. 96 attempts to transfer accountability from this House to the other place. The Lord Chancellor may have highly desirable qualities as a judge: he may be able, very rationally and properly, to make appointments to certain bodies—for example, the Council of Tribunals. The Home Secretary, however, is the right Minister to refer to the press commission matters raised by constituents.
Constituents have taken the trouble—and have used their money—to telephone me in London, 200 miles from the constituency, to complain about what has been said in The Sun. Many people believe that the press is not sensitive enough in other respects. I heard the Minister mention on the radio this morning the recent case involving the Princess Royal's letters, and I have referred to the hon. Member who was bereaved in the recent past.
Surely to God there is a need for the Bill. Surely to God there is a need for a press commission—for something more than we have had over the past 40 years, which has not altered the press one little bit. Surely it is right for the Home Secretary to be able to exercise some control, on behalf of this democratic body, over the national press. We hear talk about freedom of the press, but there is no free press in this country. There are fewer newspapers and fewer newspaper proprietors than there were in 1948.
We should be able to question the Home Secretary. We do not wish to listen to Rupert Murdoch's vicars on earth on the Conservative Benches; we want our constituents' complaints to be dealt with. Who is in a position to redress the foul material that we have seen in The Sun this week, or even to register a complaint against the large photograph displayed on the front page of the Daily Mirror? To whom should we complain in the light of the last 40 years of Press Council inactivity, unwillingness or inability to deal with what happened throughout that period? It has to be the Home Secretary.

Mr. Pat Wall: My hon. Friend asks who should be responsible for dealing with press outrages. He referred, rightly, to the absolute horror of the people of Liverpool over the headlines in The Sun and The Star and the abominable, frightening and terrifying photographs of the disaster. At the time of the Valley Parade football ground disaster in my constituency, there were press allegations that the fire had been started deliberately by incendiarists. They caused enormous anguish to many people in Bradford who were already devastated by the injuries and the loss of life. Nothing was done about that, despite the fact that the Popplewell inquiry found that those allegations were completely erroneous and untrue. As the representative of a constituency that suffered from such a disaster, I can only sympathise with my hon. Friend and the people of Liverpool who have had to put up with not only the Hillsborough disaster but the filth and calumny that has been heaped upon them by the dregs of the press.

Mr. Wareing: I thank my hon. Friend for what he has said. I hope that it registers with Ministers. That would be in the interests of the families of the 95 people of Liverpool who died and of all those who suffered as a result of the fire


at the Valley Parade football ground in Bradford. They are far and away more important than millionaire tycoons, some from overseas, who are allowed to get away with all this filth without any real action being taken against them by a Minister of the Crown.
When the Right of Reply Bill ultimately reaches the statute book it is important that the Minister with responsibility for these matters should be able to refer them to a press commission that has real teeth and that can dispossess these people—or creatures; that is how they are looked on by my constituents in Liverpool. That is why we oppose the new clause. All that the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Gow) seeks to ensure is that the problem is moved further and further away from the democratic representatives of constituents and that it is dealt with by the other place. We must ensure that the Home Secretary is able to deal with these creatures of the press. I hope that we shall create a press commission that has the power to impose real penalties on wrongdoers who are doing more damage to the press than any damage of which pornographers could be accused.

Mr. Greg Knight: I wish to speak briefly about my amendments which are grouped with new clause 5—Amendments Nos. 76, 77, 84 and 88. I invite the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) to say at the end of my speech that he is prepared to accept the amendments. Their purpose is to alter the appointments procedure. According to the Bill, the Secretary of State would appoint all the Members of the press commission for the first year. The amendments provide that in subsequent years only half the members would be appointed by the Secretary of State and that the other half would be appointed by the press commission.
I urge the promoter of the Bill to accept the amendments because, under the Bill as drafted, the Secretary of State would have complete control over the press commission because it would allow him to appoint all its members. That raises important questions about the independence of the press commission and the issue of Government control. Some fear that a future Government might use the press commission as a Government agent to exercise a form of censorship. I was shocked that yesterday the Evening Standard expressed that very fear. Its editorial column headed, "Rights and wrongs" stated:
By giving the most secretive Government in the Western world statutory control of the Press, it would inhibit our fundamental purpose to investigate and write about matters of real public interest … Nor is there anything to protect the newspaper from frivolous demands for reply, each of which would have to go before the Government-appointed press commission for settlement within 28 days.
There are already fears that the press commission would act as an arm of Government.
I was absolutely amazed by the comments in the Evening Standard because I regard my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary as one of the most liberal Home Secretaries we have had, and I am sure that those fears are groundless. Nevertheless they have to be taken into account. To give the press and the public confidence in the press commission's independence, clearly the Government should relinquish some of their control over it. The easiest solution would be for the Secretary of State initially to appoint all the members of the press commission, but subsequently it would be reasonable and sensible for the press commission to appoint a proportion of its members

—my amendment has suggested half—so that accusations such as that in the Evening Standard cannot fairly and reasonably be made.

Mr. Batiste: It will be clear from some of my interventions in the debate that I am unhappy with the drafting of the Bill. I abstained on Second Reading because I hoped that the Bill would emerge from Committee in a form that I would find acceptable. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) is in his place as it is important that he understands why some of us have opposed his Bill today, but would not necessarily oppose a future Bill on similar lines were it drafted and structured differently.
I fully appreciate the disappointment that the hon. Gentleman must feel, having been successful in the ballot and having chosen an important subject for his private Bill, to see it disappear into the sands of time on Report. Having read the Committee Hansard, I recognise the good nature in which the Bill has proceeded, and I should not like him to feel that I was aggrieved at the way in which he handled my earlier attempt to ask him questions. By the same token, I hope that he will pay serious attention to the points that I should like to make about new clause 4 and, the amendments grouped with it.
I should disclose an interest in the sense that I am a lawyer and my law firm acts for a wide variety of clients, some of whom publish local newspapers, but not for the national or tabloid press. On occasions we have acted for those who are deeply aggrieved at what goes into the press, so I have been able to examine the issue from both sides. Perhaps my greatest interest, as a lawyer, is that the Bill as drafted would create so much extra work for lawyers in the courts that it would go a very long way towards replacing the loss of the conveyancing monopoly. In that sense perhaps I am speaking against my interests in saying that I should prefer a Bill that was less likely to come to the courts for judicial review and interpretation of so many of its clauses.
The core of my concern is the nature of the press commission. As the Bill is drafted, there is the potential for the commission to become, as I said earlier, some Orwellian nightmare of a Ministry of Justice, having in place all the apparatus of oppressive censorship, including a kangaroo court, palm tree justice and all the other things that I would find unacceptable in any other area of judicial activity in Britain.
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The amendments relate to a particular part of the Bill so I shall confine my comments to that. However, flowing from that is a wider range of issues which concern my hon. Friends and myself. We are genuinely appreciative of all the points that have been raised by hon. Members and by many of our constituents. They are fed up with the antics of some sections of the press and their incapacity to appreciate the resentment they have created by their behaviour. Nobody outside the House should think that those of us who have been trying to amend the Bill to a form that we would find acceptable are offering comfort to those sections of the press. Should a Bill appear next year, either from a private Member or the Government, our reactions would not necessarily be the same.

Mr. Fisher: The hon. Gentleman said that his actions and those of his hon. Friends should not be interpreted in


that way. Does he not understand that that is how the tabloid press will interpret them? The press will take comfort from his comments and will see that they are being enabled to go on in this thoroughly unacceptable manner because hon. Members have sought to block this constructive Bill.

Mr. Batiste: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, because I can do no more than put on record my interpretation and, if any other interpretation is drawn from my comments, it will be wrong.
I have had considerable experience of the way in which tribunals in different areas operate. I have to balance the wrongs done to some individuals, which are so far without remedy for all sorts of reasons that have been described during the debate, with what I would see as the hamstringing of the press. That is not just a convenient slogan for trying to stick up for newspaper barons. It is an appreciation of the fact that one of the important pillars of a democracy is a press which at times is willing to make itself unpopular with Governments and people in trying to expose the truth. The press may sometimes go over the line, but, in balancing those issues, it would be wrong for a Member of Parliament to support what seems to be easy and popular now while placing in hostage the future of something that is fundamental to our democracy.
I support some amendments in the group and not others, the switch from the Secretary of State to the Lord Chancellor in the appointment of members of the press commission appears in one of the amendments. It will be clear from what I have said that my main concern is caused by the nature of the press commission. Clause 2 states that the press commission shall
comprise 21 members … appointed by the Secretary of State.
I looked for some further clarification as to the balance of the commission. I looked to paragraphs 5 and 6 of the schedule but I found that the only balance listed is in terms of race, gender and regional representation in society. Those are important matters, but when one is appointing a group of people who can have a profound effect on our society, many other factors should be taken into account.
For that reason, we must look at the nature of the appointment of those people. I should have preferred to see much more specification in the Bill. When quangos are created elsewhere, a careful balance between the competing interests is usually provided in the Bill. It is a grave omission that there is no such balance in this Bill. The attempt at balance listed in the Bill does not carry any serious significance having regard to the nature of the work to be carried out by the commission. It has no boundaries and can deal with matters as they arise, but, because of its voluntary nature, it does not need safeguards to prevent abuses of power. I appreciate hon. Members' points that the Press Council by no means fulfils that role, but I hope that the voluntary body created as a result of Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper's appointment and the changes that he is proposing will give the public and hon. Members greater confidence.
I accept, however, that there may have to be some form of statutory control, but, rather than creating a press commission, we should be considering a quasi-judicial body. Across many aspects of society, when it is deemed that the courts are too formal, long winded or costly to

offer a reasonable and quick remedy, we have had much experience in the establishment of a variety of tribunals and appointments to them. I have experience of industrial relations, and much of the transformation in industrial relations over the past decade occurred as a result of industrial tribunals and the confidence that they have engendered in both sides of industry. A clear and sensible appeal procedure is available, and I should like us to take that direction.
I should like the promoter to accept that the implementation of this Bill and appointments made under it should be left with the most senior member of the judiciary. It is difficult not to feel strongly about the experiences of the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Mr. Wareing), but moving to a system under the Lord Chancellor would not stifle the development of the Bill. Rather it would put it on a path for which there would be wider acceptability.
The role of such a body would be not only to hear complaints but to issue guidelines. I have difficulty understanding what this largely ill-defined body will do to establish guidelines without a clear indication of the methods that it must consider and what penalties will be available.
Bodies such as the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service have been charged with the duty of establishing guidelines to improve industrial relations. A solution to establishing a code of behaviour is not an insuperable problem, but the key to much of ACAS's success is that to a large degree it is voluntary and because of the treatment of its codes as evidence in hearings in industrial tribunals it carries much weight. The amendments that shift the balance from the Home Office to the Lord Chancellor and the judicial system must be an important step in the right direction for future Bills.
Under the proposed amendments the new body would be established by a statutory instrument. The House should have another opportunity to express its will before a Bill is passed because there are bound to be developments between now and then that hon. Members should take into account. I should be willing to support an amendment to that effect, but I am less enthusiastic about the other amendments that have been tabled, especially amendment No. 77, which proposes that initially the commission should comprise 21 members. I think that 21 members is far too many and should not like an amendment to expand that number because it could grow uncontrollably if there were no limits.
Although I share the disappointment of the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie that his Bill will not get on the statute book, I hope that he will accept that there is a great deal of good will for his aims, even among hon. Members who have spoken against aspects of the Bill. We are looking forward to seeing legislation that will redress the considerable wrongs that undoubtedly exist in a way that we can accept.

Mr. Grocott: I should, perhaps, declare an interest as a member of the National Union of Journalists, although I do not agree with the approach of my union to the Bill. I also could not disagree more strongly with the views of the hon. Member for Elmet (Mr. Batiste), who said that he did not consider the Home Secretary to be the right person to deal with appointments to the press commission. The Home Secretary is precisely the right person for an extremely important reason. He already has the statutory


responsibility across broadcasting for ensuring that a range of objectives, similar to those we are trying to obtain in the Bill, are secured.
The Minister of State gave a wholly unacceptable reply to my earlier intervention. Home Office Ministers are responsible under the Broadcasting Act 1981 for the Independent Broadcasting Authority to satisfy itself that:
all news in the programmes (in whatever form) is presented with due accuracy.
That is the responsibility throughout independent television. It is astonishing that the Home Office should take the view that it is important to ensure fairness, impartiality and accuracy in broadcasting, yet should not seem to be concerned to ensure those objectives for the press.
It is odd that Home Office Ministers should keep saying that the whole matter is unworkable. That was also the gist of the comments of the hon. Member for Elmet. Of course, concepts such as fairness, impartiality and accuracy are difficult and we could all debate them for hours, but it seems that we keep trying to rediscover the wheel. Such questions are asked and dealt with day in and day out by the people whose business is to be involved in broadcasting journalism, and such questions are dealt with by means of documents such as the television programme guidelines, which lay down sensible requirements about accuracy and the necessity to correct inaccuracies when they occur and, on live broadcasts, to ensure that the error is admitted as quickly as possible after the inaccuracy has occurred.
There are difficulties in implementing the guidelines, but no one believes that the regulations are a serious intrusion into the freedom of journalists and broadcasters. On the contrary, they enhance the quality of journalism. Journalists working in broadcasting do not feel inhibited by having to work under such guidelines. I have not yet met one journalist who has said that he will not leave printed journalism to join the broadcasting section because he would be hopelessly inhibited in what he could say. There is no shortage of people wanting to leave printed journalism to go into broadcasting.
These are commonsense rules and regulations. They are spelt out and are open for anyone to see. People can see copies of the television guidelines in the Library. One can complain if one feels that one has been treated unjustly and, ultimately, the Home Secretary has the statutory power to see, through the Independent Broadcasting Authority, that frequently offending companies are no longer able to broadcast when the franchises come up for review. No one sees such a regulatory framework as unfair or restrictive—the spectres raised by Conservative Members who suggested that we are trying to create a monster through this innocuous and gentle little Bill.
It is surely far better that the pressures and controls are made open. I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) has left us. He sat through the earlier part of the debate and had I known that he would not be here when I spoke, I would have informed him accordingly. I thought that he might want to listen to the whole debate, rather than to rely on what the press has to say on the matter. It is astonishing for him to talk about restricting the freedom of the press when, as a senior Minister, he did his utmost to intimidate the BBC. I infinitely prefer regulations that are clearly spelt out and understood, and to which everyone can refer when the

need arises, to the nasty little phone call and to the nod and the wink, more in keeping with the style of the right hon. Member for Chingford.
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What do we need to fear, and why is not the Home Office being consistent? I think that the Home Secretary should make the appointments and I await in vain a proper explanation of why the Government want to regulate broadcasting but not the press. I fear that the answer is the answer given by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher): they want broadcasting to follow the example of The Sun. Their approach will then have the merit of consistency, although it will be a deeply depressing day for freedom and for the accuracy, objectivity and quality of journalism.
The Government tell us that the proposed Broadcasting Bill takes the press as its model. The Home Secretary himself has said that it will give people the choice that they have when they thumb through newspapers in a newsagent's shop. There are two models for accurate news and current affairs reporting in this country. One is the press—in particular the tabloid press—and the other is public sector broadcasting. I know which model I prefer. It is absolutely essential that we are consistent in our approach to these matters, and to look to the example of the broadcast media is infinitely preferable to the alternative.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Mr. Ian Aitken—[HON. MEMBERS: "Who?"]—I am sorry, Mr. Jonathan Aitken.

Mr. Aitken: I have not changed sides yet, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Grocott) had a point when he complained about the possible lack of consistency in our approach towards broadcasting standards and standards in the press. Only last week, I was able to draw the attention of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in a question to the fact that the Government and the Home Office had endorsed the latest EEC directive on broadcasting and television which enshrines in EEC legislation the principle of a right of reply. It is somewhat bizarre to find the Government apparently endorsing the right to reply by stealth in Brussels while being so oddly equivocal about it—to put it politely—in this place.

Mr. Renton: My hon. Friend's words "by stealth" have stung me into action. My hon. Friend should know that the original draft of the EC directive contained the words "right of reply". We specifically arranged for that article to be changed to ensure that all that Britain had to do to comply with the directive was to continue with our Broadcasting Complaints Commission, which has existed for a long time and whose remit specifically and only covers
unjust or unfair treatment … or unwarranted infringement of privacy in, or in connection with the obtaining of material included in, sound and television programmes.
Those are the limited objectives of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission. The EC directive deals only with broadcasting, in any case, and we ensured that the relevant article was amended to make it clear that we should merely have to continue with our present Broadcasting Complaints Commission.

Mr. Aitken: Even that limited achievement would be welcome in legislation on the press. By the words "by stealth" I meant "by parliamentary stealth". The fact remains that the House has been given no opportunity whatever to debate the directive, which is a matter of some shame in the way in which we deal with European legislation.

Mr. Renton: My hon. Friend has forgotten that the draft directive was debated way back in January 1987.

Mr. Aitken: We are getting away from the Bill. That was an extremely bad point. The directive, which has been massively redrafted, is heading for ratification by the Commission. As the Select Committee on European Legislation discovered the other day, it has not been properly debated. There has been quite a row on the matter. My hon. Friend the Minister may be more astray with his facts than I am. I want to get back to the new clause.

Mr. Gow: Is my hon. Friend aware that every one of his hon. Friends, with the sole exception—I am sorry to have to say this—of my hon. Friends the Minister and the Comptroller of Her Majesty's Household agrees with him about that EEC directive? I want him to know that he has unanimous support, apart from the two present occupants of the Treasury Bench.

Madam Deputy Speaker: The hon. Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken) said that he would like to get back to the new clause. I am sure that he will do so now.

Mr. Aitken: I am heartened by the unanimity of support for what I have said so far. I suspect that mine will be the only Conservative voice in favour of the much-maligned Bill. I am glad to support the new clause which was ably and amusingly moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Gow).
The new clause raises the issues whether the Bill should be handled by the Lord Chancellor and whether it should be delayed at the Lord Chancellor's discretion. I suspect that that was the prime purpose of my hon. Friend's thinking. Many experts on delaying tactics are present. I hardly think that it is necessary to drag in the poor old Lord Chancellor as a delaying long-stop. Nevertheless, although I support the Bill, I am not unduly critical of the delaying tactics which have been used by some of my hon. Friends. All is fair in love, war and parliamentary procedure, as the saying goes.
There is some merit in pausing and thinking about the Bill. Neither my hon. Friends nor the editors who have addressed us through a microphone over the past few days needed to have got quite so hot under the collar about the Bill. It is flawed to some extent, and the flaws were visible from the start. Three months ago, I wrote to the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) to say that I would start with him on the Bill but that I had some doubts about whether I would finish with him. There are some genuine doubts, some of which may be resolved by the introduction of the delaying mechanism of the Lord Chancellor.
I pay a genuine tribute to the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie. He has done more than any other individual in recent memory to start the important process of cleaning up the Augean stables of the British tabloid press. There is wide agreement that the clean-up should take place. We seem to disagree on the methods by

which it should take place. Should it involve statutory legislation? Should it involve the Home Secretary? Should it involve the Lord Chancellor?
I am attracted to the new clause, not least because of the persuasive arguments which were put forward on legal or quasi-legal grounds by my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet (Mr. Batiste). The new clause envisages the Bill being passed and then being suspended like some legal sword of Damocles over the head of the British press until it can be dropped on it—presumably after acts of further misbehaviour—at the discretion of the Lord Chancellor. If we accept the new clause and pass the Bill, we will give the British press one last chance to put its own house in order. If it does not do so, the Bill—warts and all, flaws and all —will crash down on the head of what used to be called Fleet street.
The cry "Let's give the press one last chance" has been heard with great frequency and intensity in the past few days. There has been an almost hysterical reaction to the Bill from editorial writers, proprietors, editors and journalists. I have been much amused by all the comment. I was riveted to receive an expensive glossy brochure from Mr. Max Hasting, the editor of The Daily Telegraph. I was even more amused when the editor of the "Sunday Lonhro" addressed us all last Sunday in an editorial of Guardian-like length about the need to kill off the Bill. If there is one newspaper at what used to be called the quality end of the market that has sacrificed all pretence to integrity and impartiality, it is the "Sunday Lonhro" and its journalists—or, as they should now be called, `Rowlandists'.
The serious aspect of press over-reaction to the Bill is that if only one tenth of the energy, dedication, crusading zeal and expense that the press put into opposing the Bill was devoted to putting its own house in order, there would be no need for the Bill and for Parliament to spend time on the matter. If the press does want to put its house in order, I see precious little sign of any serious intention to do so.
One of the ways in which the press could put its own house in order is to spend much more of its own money on the Press Council, giving that enfeebled but well-intentioned organisation better-paid staff, more professionals, and its own investigators, lawyers and publicity budget. The national press could well afford to do that.The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph make profits of more than £30 million a year. The Sunday Times, whose editor has been just as pompous as other editors in his comments on the Bill's weaknesses, makes more than £70 million per year. Its stablemate The Sun, makes more than £60 million per year. The national press as a whole is making unprecedented profits of about £250 million a year. What proportion of those enormous profits goes to the Press Council—the only alternative regulating body to that proposed in the Bill?
It is revealed on page 213 of the Press Council's 1988 annual report that the Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents the entire resources of all national newspapers, contributed £276,000—about 0·1 per cent., or one tenth of one per cent. of the profits of the national press—to the goal of self-regulation. I say to the press that it should put its money where its big mouth is. Instead of the Press Council having a £500,000 budget, it should have a budget of about £5 million to do the job that the Minister and the amendment want it to do.
In the absence of serious press money or intentions, new clause 5 returns to the whole question of statutory


regulation and who should enforce it—the Lord Chancellor or the Home Secretary. I am a late convert to the right of reply cause. For most of my own journalistic and political life I have held aloft the rather tattered banner of press freedom. I opposed the first right of reply Bill introduced by Mr. Frank Allaun. I am still nervous about supporting a measure that will undoubtedly impose restrictions on the press. One of the strong reasons for my nervousness is that most of the British press does not need or deserve right of reply legislation. We should all feel a certain sadness that so many decent national and regional newspapers that report the news fairly and honourably correct their own mistakes are confronted with a Bill of this kind because they are tarred with the brush of the lower tabloids. What a mean and dirty brush it is.

Mr. Fisher: The hon. Gentleman remarks that many national and regional newpapers do not deserve the Bill. However, if they are careful about the accuracy of their reporting, they have nothing to fear from the Bill—contrary to the impression given by many journalists in editorials and features over the past few days.

Mr. Aitken: I agree that the Bill, even with its undoubted flaws, does not hold out the threat of a sword of Damocles —as I called the amendment—to the decent press. After all, right of reply legislation exists in many other countries without provoking the excitable reaction we have witnessed over the past few days.
There is a cancer growing at the heart of the British press today. At the centre of that cancer is the fact that some tabloid newspapers have moved right away from reporting the news and from all forms of traditional journalism, investigative or otherwise. At the lower end of the tabloid market, journalism has been replaced by voyeurism. The reporter's profession has been infiltrated by a seedy stream of rent boys, pimps, bimbos, spurned lovers, smear artists bearing grudges, prostitutes and perjurers. It is a cast of shame which has not been seen in public since the trial of Oscar Wilde. Yet here it is propping up the pages of the tabloids with monotonous and tasteless regularity. That is the force that makes constituents say to Members of Parliament, "Get on and do something about it".

Mr. Corbyn: The hon. Gentleman draws an excellent analogy between the lack of a right of reply in the United Kingdom and its existence in other countries. Does he agree that Britain and Australia are the two countries with the most concentrated ownership of newspapers and, possibly, the worst quality of tabloids in the world? Countries with a diversity of ownership tend to have a far better quality of average newspaper than we have.

Mr. Aitken: The concentration of ownership is undesirable. As the story of the Irishman goes, "I would not have started from here" with this concentration of ownership in the British press or with the even greater concentration that exists in the Australian press.
There could, however, be some advantages in the concentration of ownership when it comes to cleaning up the act. It is not circulation wars, competition or the fight for profits that have brought about this unhappy position. It is, to use an old-fashioned label, the moral standards of certain proprietors and editors which has caused the rot to set in. A newspaper, like a fish, rots from the head

downwards. Certain newspaper proprietors have given encouragement and promotion to a thoroughly evil clique of lower tabloid editors, whose ruthlessness and recklessnes with the truth is so notorious that their papers publish lies regularly and unashamedly.
The House is considering the Bill because Parliament thinks that it is time for the lying to have to stop. The question is: who will stop it? Clearly, the Government are not keen to stop it now. Until today their most memorable contribution to the argument about standards in the lower tabloids was to recommend the previous editor of The Sun for a knighthood. So much for Victorian values.
The announcement today of my hon. Friend the Minister that the British tabloids are now on probation is like putting Jack the Ripper or the Boston strangler on probation. It is not likely to be effective. One then turns to the courts, which brings me to the argument of my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet. Can the courts in any judicial form with the help of the Lord Chancellor, whose role in this is important, do anything to stop the lying? They are doing their best. Juries' massive awards of libel damages are a symptom of the public's distaste for what is going on, but for every Koo Stark, Elton John or Jeffery Archer, there are 50 ordinary individuals libelled just as gravely in terms of loss of reputation, who simply cannot afford to use the libel laws to seek redress. Courts of law, like the Ritz hotel, are open only to those who can afford them.
The tabloids now write into their editorial budgets costs for settling libel actions. It is a lie now, pay later habit. If a tabloid makes as much as £1 million a week, settling two or three libel actions at £30,000 or £40,000 a time makes a small dent in the profits.
To illustrate how ineffective the courts are, even at the most excitable and dramatic end of the scale, I shall run through the most spectacular libel case of them all. This will show why we need the involvement of the Lord Chancellor. The case of Elton John v. The Sun was the worst of its kind, not just because of the viciousness of The Sun's smear capaign or size of the libel damages, but because of the fascinating insight which it gave the world into the techniques and tactics of the newspaper, particularly from the moment after it knew that it had made a disastrous mistake.
The headlines tell their own story. On 25 February 1987, The Sun newspaper splashed across its front page: "Elton in Vice Boys Scandal". On the next day the headline was, "Elton's Kinky Kinks"; on the next, "Elton's Drug Capers" and on the next, "Elton's Pink Tutu Party". There was a series of allegations about drugs, male prostitutes and bondage. Every smear, criminal and moral, was in those articles.
Those stories were prepared by the editor of The Sun, Mr. Kelvin MacKenzie, and appeared under the byline of his brother, Mr. Craig MacKenzie. That was the gentleman who The Independent told us has a nickname in the confines of The Sun of the "bouncing bog brush". Mr. Murdoch is not in favour of jobs for the boys, but he appears to be in favour of jobs for the brothers and jobs for the bog brushes.
Those bouncing bog brushes smeared their filth for days and days across the front page of the newspaper. However, there was a central flaw in those stories. They were entirely made up. They were sheer unadulterated fiction. The basis for those stories was uncorroborated allegations contributed by a rent boy, who appeared in The


Sun as Mr. Graham X, but whose real name was Mr. Stephen Hardy. He was paid by The Sun £2,000 down and a retainer of £250 a week.
In a riveting feature published in The Independent magazine, published in February, Stephen Hardy said:
97 per cent. of it was untrue. I would give The Sun a line and they would write it all up. It was a manufactured story.
What is fascinating about that, and why we need the Lord Chancellor, as suggested in new clause 5, is that The Sun discovered early in the procedure that it was horribly wrong. It had clearly not done its homework, it had not checked the story and it knew that it was printing lies.
What did The Sun do, however, when at the very start of the procedure, Mr. Elton John, through his lawyers, sought a retraction, an apology and a right of reply? Despite knowing that it was wrong—after printing the big lie—it decided it would win through by going for a bigger lie. It then doubled its pressure, as can be seen from the headline on 27 February, which said: "You're a Liar Elton." I might add that that is a familiar technique of The Sun.
There was a famous Press Council ruling about a Wapping lorry driver called Mr. McCabe. The Sun printed all kinds of nonsence about him and he went to the Press Council. He obtained a ruling in his favour. The Sun then printed the Press Council's ruling under the headline,
You"re Still a Lying Trucker.
The Sun continued to scour the planet for more filth on Mr. Elton John. It paid £10,000 for polaroid pictures of him nude with a man, which had nothing to do with its original allegations. The Independent said:
The Sun's game plan was to keep on hitting Elton John so hard that he would give up long before the judge heard the matter.
That is what The Sun tried to do, but Elton John stuck to his guns and he received £1 million in libel damages and an apology from The Sun—which infuriated the judge—"Sorry, Elton." It was a cheeky style of apology.
The story of The Sun's handling of that case has clearly shown what its moral standards are. Paying £1 million must have hurt even Mr. Murdoch's pockets, but clearly it was not enough. Mr. MacKenzie is still in his place. No one appears to have been fired over the incident. There has been no proper apology to the public or to the readers. As the judge said in the case of Elton John, it was a pretty cheeky kind of apology that was eventually printed. Therefore, it is not satisfactory to say that the courts are adequately handling the matter through the antique machinery of the libel laws. If The Sun is making more than £1 million a week, it can afford to pay £1 million in damages.
The Press Council has been held up by the Minister as a great shield and the reason we do not need the Bill: warts and all, the Press Council will do the job for us. However, in the past the Press Council has been absurdly weak and ineffective. We are asked to believe that the arrival of Louis Blom-Cooper—my hon. Friend paid tribute to him when moving the new clause—means that all will change. It is believed that somehow Hercules has arrived at the Augean stables or Superman has reached the sewage farm. We had the same high hopes when Sir Zelman Cowan was brought from Australia. He presided over the most disastrous deterioration of standards in the history of Fleet Street.
I am somewhat underwhelmed by the prospect of Mr. Blom-Cooper's new broom. I wish him well, but there are many things wrong with the Press Council. Editors do not have to appear in person, but I am glad that the NUJ is to take up Press Council membership; that is a step in the right direction. Complainants have no right to an oral inquiry, the findings, if published at all, are published in much too small type and, above all, the Press Council lacks resources.
What on earth is there to stop another Elton John, another McCabe, another spate of excesses? We see them almost daily in the tabloid newspapers. In the end the buck must come back to us. It is all very well to say that the press is on probation and that we should give it one more chance. I would love to believe that that approach would work, but I believe that the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie has done the House and the country a fine service. His Bill is full of flaws and, under parliamentary scrutiny, perhaps it does not deserve to reach the statute book yet—perhaps we need new clause 5 as a long stop.
In the end, unless there is a real change of heart, a new direction of resources and a new determination by the press to clean up its act, we will be back in business again, with some form of ferocious and totally deserved restrictive legislation on the press, which all of us would greatly regret.

Mr. Brian Sedgemore: I intend to be brief. We have just listened to a delightful speech from the hon. Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken). The hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not try to follow him in wisdom and humour and if I try to stick to the amendment.
The hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Gow), who introduced the new clause, is a bit unfair on the Lord Chancellor. I would have thought that he had enough problems on his hands dealing with the lawyers, of whom the hon. Gentleman is one, and he should leave the journalists alone. Lord Chief Justice Lane has ludicrously said that the Lord Chancellor is wearing a swastika on his arm and that he is leaning towards the right of Fascism. Lord Justice Donaldson is organising a strike and Queen's counsellors in this House are meeting in the all-party barrister's committee upstairs plotting the Lord Chancellor's downfall and, no doubt, his death. A previous Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, has said that the Lord Chancellor and the Prime Minister are guilty of ideological baloney. I would have thought that that was enough for anyone to deal with and a good enough reason for leaving the Home Office to deal with this Bill.
I am sure that the Lord Chancellor would have been rather puzzled if he had read the papers this week. He would have pondered on how an unholy alliance has come about between the Home Secretary, the editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston, the editor of The Observer, Donald Trelford and the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit). Even the right hon. Gentleman must admit that it is an unholy alliance and that it was not always thus. I am sure that we were all pleased to see that the right hon. Gentleman took about £11,000 from The Guardian for telling lies about him, but I also understand that such an alliance will not always exist in the future. I believe that Donald Trelford, editor of The Observer is trying to make unkind comments about the right hon. Gentleman when he was Secretary of State for Industry concerning some


shop and the House of Fraser. But they have all come together in a grand alliance and I am sure that the Lord Chancellor will be worried about that.
One serious argument in favour of handing over some of the responsibilities for the Bill to the Lord Chancellor's Department was highlighted when my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) compared the regulation of television with the regulation of the press. I speak as someone who worked in television for four years and as a Member of the NUJ who writes a bit now and then.
There is a genuine worry about the Home Office running the Bill, which might be a good argument in favour of the Lord Chancellor. The Home Office has used a system of censorship that has, for a long time, been secretive and unpleasant. Last night I was reading some history about the way in which censorship has operated in broadcasting. I asked myself whether we want the Home Secretary and, with great respect, the Minister present to have anything to do with the Bill? I thought back to the early 1980s when a television programme "Death of a Princess" was broadcast. Immediately the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary responded to criticism from Saudi Arabia and said that trade was more important than freedom of speech. They believed that we should censor that programme and that we should not show it again. More recently, I thought about another drama documentary. "Tumbledown", which dealt with the Falklands war. The Home Office made quiet noises, saying "We really do not think that this programme should be shown. There ought to be some censorship—some restriction of freedom of expression."
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I thought about another television programme, "Death on the Rock". Again, the Home Office made it clear that it did not want the programme to be shown. I remember "Real Lives", a television film in which a former Home Secretary was shifted elsewhere and then shunted off to Europe as part of his hurry-on-down process—I refer to Sir Leon Brittan.
I thought of the Zircon film, which again the Home Office did not want shown and which was suppressed. I thought of "My Country, right or wrong", another BBC programme that the Home Office wanted to be suppressed. I even thought of a drama which the Home Office had managed to stop, "Left Over People" by Tom Pickard. I remembered the BBC's attempts to secure a repeat of a drama called "United Kingdom" by Roland Joffé, on which I was a researcher.
Surely it would be better for the Bill to be dealt with by the Lord Chancellor than by the Home Secretary and the Minister who tried to censor all those programmes. The Home Office's record of censorship is appalling. Why are the editors of so-called radical papers, Peter Preston of The Guardian and Donald Trelford of The Observer, forming an unholy alliance to blast off against my hon. Friend's modest little Bill? It makes me wonder whether someone ought to pass the sick bag.

Mr. Patrick Ground: The new clause and amendments raise two important questions—first, whether the Bill should come into effect on the day on which it is passed or at a later date, and, secondly, whether the Home Secretary or the Lord Chancellor should administer it.
The amendments, and the debate on them, illustrate the difficulties of the Bill, which I mentioned on Second Reading—the confusion between the judicial remedies and the types of remedy provided by the Press Council and the press commission, and the constitutional difficulty of Government-appointed nominees correcting factual errors in the press.
Obviously no Minister is rushing forward to carry out the responsibilities imposed by the Bill. The hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Grocott) seemed to see some sinister reason for the Government's lack of enthusiasm for the task, but I see some virtue in their reluctance to grapple with such powers. That reluctance stems from a recognition of the constitutional dangers of Government becoming involved in the correction of errors in the press. The examples quoted by the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) illustrate the possible difficulties of a confrontation between the Government and the press about a number of sensitive matters.
I accept that, when circumstances require the exercise of something resembling judicial functions, there is a strong case for making the Lord Chancellor responsible for appointments and for the administration of the legislation. Recommendations have been made that planning and transport inspectors should come under the aegis of the Lord Chancellor, and I see the force of such arguments in the present context. I suggest that the duties that the Bill would impose would sit uneasily with the Lord Chancellor's other duties. The appointment of the Lord Chancellor to this task implies that the body to be created would be a much more judicial body than would really be the case. As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is involved with broadcasting and television, I am led to the conclusion that, if a Minister is to be given the job, it should be given to him rather than to the Lord Chancellor.
I hope that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher) will tell us what he thinks about the starting date of the Bill. He says that history will be on the side of the Bill, but at no point did I hear him say that Opposition Front Bench spokesmen are behind it or its starting date. I heard him speak on Second Reading and I listened to his speech today. I should like him to clarify when, if at all, he considers that the Bill ought to come into force.
I listened with great sympathy to what was said by the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) both on Second Reading and again today, and I share the admiration that has been expressed about the way he has conducted the Bill. However, the two difficulties that I have mentioned prevent me from supporting it. I believe that we should benefit from a delay in the starting date of the Bill, if it were to reach the statute book, in order to assess the reforms that the Press Council is undertaking. I envisage greater benefits from the reform of the Press Council than from the somewhat inadequate remedies that the Bill contains.
For those reasons, I do not support the inclusion of the Lord Chancellor in the Bill. I support, however, the deferment of the starting date so that there may be more time for further reflection.

Mr. Tebbit: I oppose the new clause for slightly different reasons from those that were given by the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore). As is known, there has been an unholy


alliance between myself and Mr. Peter Preston, who courageously published in his newspaper an article by me that attacked strongly his newspaper's record on this matter and brought out the fact that I had been forced to go to law to clear my name after an unfair and untrue allegation was published in his paper. That shows an element of courtesy and decency by The Guardian. I do not usually praise that newspaper, so I take this opportunity to do so.
The hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch made the interesting point that he does not trust the Home Secretary to deal with these matters because of his record on the electronic media. He ought, therefore, to come all the way with me and say that he does not trust the record of Ministers or politicians as showing that they have any influence whatsoever over what the press should or should not publish. In that case, he would become, with me, an opponent of the Bill in general.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken) said, that does not mean that there is not a great deal that is wrong with certain sections of the press. If we can find a way to bring more pressure to bear on them to change their attitudes, I am all for it. What gives me the greatest unease—whether it is the Lord Chancellor or the Home Secretary—is that Ministers would have the power to appoint people to what is called a press commission that would inevitably seek more and more power to deal with what the commission regard as press abuses.
We should not accept the new clause, although it was introduced so eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Gow), because when something gets into the hands of the legal profession and the Lord Chancellor it moves away from things that we ordinary mortals may comment on into a rarefied area where people go all judicial on us. It is very difficult to get Law Officers into a debate in the House about the conduct of their Department's affairs. It is not nearly so difficult to deal with a Secretary of State or a Home Secretary. That is why I disagree with my hon. Friend.
The most important result of the activities of the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie is that the Government have been forced to think seriously about the extent of their responsibility for putting pressure on the press to publish or not to publish. I am totally against the so-called right of reply being a statutory right enforced by state-appointed commissioners. Quite rightly, the Government have concluded that they should conduct a broad-based inquiry and we should await any recommendations that might be produced.

Sir Peter Emery: Before my right hon. Friend leaves the appointment of commissioners, is he not terrified at the fact that clause 6 suggests that the commissioners
shall issue guidelines and advice as necessary to improve editorial standards."?
Does that not mean that Government-appointed commissioners could begin to judge exactly what the editorial content of newspapers may or may not be? That would be an extremely slippery slope.

Mr. Tebbit: To stay precisely in order, I have not referred to my amendment which would remove those powers from the press commission, if it were ever to be created.
As a consequence of the efforts of the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie and my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Mr. Browne) newspaper proprietors must be beginning to think that, however many friends of the free press sit in the House—and I believe that the great majority of us believe in the concept of a free press—sooner or later we shall be rolled over by the forces of those who are prepared to dilute the freedom of the press to deal with a perceived wrong. That would be extremely dangerous.
Like many of the other irritants of democracy that we have to put up with, a free press is part of the price we have to pay. I am willing to pay that price. I have been hurt by the press more than once. Occasionally one can come back on the press, if one has the resources to do so. Most people cannot, but it is part of the price we pay for democracy. The press barons have to acknowledge that part of the price they must pay for the right to run newspapers, make profits out of newspapers and influence opinion through newspapers is that those newspapers have to be decent in the terms set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken). It has been noticed that a certain group of newspapers appears to have changed slightly. Another group of newspapers adopts various standards for different newspapers in the group.
I would not say that the Daily Mirror is guiltless. Such headings as, "And you're a liar too", and "You're still a liar" did not only appear in The Sun, but also appeared in the Daily Mirror. There would be great disputes across the Floor of the House and elsewhere as to whether those headlines were true.
Standards have to be improved and today's debate must send a signal to those press barons saying, "If you want to continue to be in business with a free press in a free country, you must consider whether, exceptionally, a proprietor has not only the right but the responsibility to put pressure on his editors to behave in a manner which would enhance the reputation of the press and not damage it."

Mr. Fisher: To my surprise, I find myself in sympathy with much of what was said by the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit). Like him, I cannot support the new clause, even though I enjoyed the amusing and elegant way in which it was moved by the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Gow). I was somewhat surprised, even shocked, by the vicious attack he launched on his right hon. Friend—I use the word "Friend" loosely or conventionally—the Secretary of State for Wales. Such clear splits in the Government so close to the by-election in the Vale of Glamorgan will have been noted.
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The hon. Member for Eastbourne raised some important issues. He addressed himself most clearly to the question of which Department should have responsibility for appointment. The prior and implicit issue raised in that is whether any Department should be involved. It is on this point that I have sympathy with the right hon. Member for Chingford. If we are serious about the independence of the press and broadcasting, we have to do everything we can to loosen Government ties. That is easier said than done. It is not only a matter of legislation. It is potently a matter of patronage in the appointment of members of the BBC, the IBA and commissions such as the press commission.
Although I strongly support everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) has done in promoting the Bill, he knows that we have had differences of opinion and that I have some grave reservations about this part of the Bill. It leaves to the Government—any Government—patronage in appointing members of the press commission. We have to find some way of establishing independence. That is not easy, and it is not something that Her Majesty's Opposition have yet cracked.
The growth of patronage spreads across and weakens public life. The fingers of Government, whichever party is in power, are spread so widely across many public bodies in which it is not only unnecessary but counter-productive for the Government to be involved. Therefore, I agree with the right hon. Member for Chingford. However, the methods that one can envisage of creating independence in any such body and finding other ways through which those people can be appointed are either cumbersomely democratic or not yet clear to me.

Mr. Tebbit: It is not often that we find ourselves in so much agreement. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be able to come with me the next step of the way and say that it would be infinitely preferable if we did not have to have these forms of control, which inevitably mean that somebody—and who else but the Government?—has to appoint commissioners of some sort. I look forward to the day when there are as many channels on our radio and television as there are channels available in the press and when we can get rid of Government control of any sort, except in respect of decency, over television and radio. I hope that he will join me in that view.

Mr. Fisher: The right hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to know that I will not join him in that view. There is a great deal of difference between the Government having a direct influence and control through patronage, and the responsibility of the Government, on behalf of our society, to set a framework that protects the rights of individuals and in which a diversity of programmes can be ensured in our broadcasting media.

Mr. Grocott: At the risk of driving a further wedge between my hon. Friend and the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) I must say that if there is to be Government involvement, it is better that it is understood and in statute than if it is the type of Government pressure that came from the right hon. Member for Chingford when he was a senior Minister in the Government. He applied quite nasty pressure on the BBC but he has been honest enough to admit that. I put it to him once that he had made veiled threats to the leaders of the BBC and he was honest enough to say, "When I make threats, they are not veiled."

Mr. Fisher: That succinct turn of phrase has a ring of authenticity. The right hon. Member for Chingford is nodding to confirm that he is the true author and begetter of the phrase. The phrase does him more credit than the instinct. I was in my local radio station the day after he made that statement in September or October 1986, and the effect of it on senior and experienced journalists was worrying. They were struck and concerned by such overt pressure from someone who was then a senior member of the Government.

Mr. Tebbit: The essence of the remark was that if I had made a threat it would have been open because I do not make behind-the-doors threats, such as those that have been made by some Governments in the past. I made no threat whatever because there was no open threat. The hon. Gentleman will not find on the record anywhere a threat that I made against the broadcasting authorities. There was a lot of pressure, yes, to tell the truth and to balance it fairly, but no threat.

Mr. Fisher: I think that we are getting into semantics, and I want to deal with the central point of the amendment—which Department should be responsible.
Curiously, under this Government and previous Governments, press matters are dealt with by the Department of Trade and Industry. The broadcasting world has been interested by the power struggle between the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the Home Secretary. I am glad that in this instance the Home Secretary has been supreme and that the Minister of State, Home Office has guided the legislation.

Mr. Skinner: I have just had an article passed to me about the right of reply. It appears that the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) has been busily demanding a right of reply of the Waltham Guardian of 20 April 1989. The right hon. Gentleman complained in a letter that his name had been left out. My hon. Friend the Member for Leyton (Mr. Cohen) and other hon. Members are mentioned in this article. Although the right hon. Member for Chingford opposes this Bill, he demanded a right of reply from the editor of the Waltham Guardian and got one. The editor says; "Our apologies to Mr. Tebbit for the arm twisting". No, that is not him. He says:
The omission was due to a paragraph falling off at the printers. Of course he has played a part in trying to remedy the Waltham Forest court situation, which we reported, and we are grateful to him and the borough's two other MPs. We are always ready to publish corrections to these reports where inaccuracies make a fundamental difference.
The truth is that if many people in Waltham Forest had written to the editor and said, "I want my letter printed and a right of reply" they would have been refused.

Mr. Fisher: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that interesting and intriguing intervention.
Labour Members do not believe that the Department of Trade and Industry is the best Department to deal with the newspaper industry, because, like broadcasting, it is not just another industry but a key element in the culture and communications of our society. The public agenda, values, traditions, and ideas of our society are sustained arid carried by the press, so it must not be dealt with like textiles or other industries. It is essentially a cultural industry and should be so handled.
For the same reasons the Labour party is concerned that the Home Office is involved in the Bill. A Department that has responsibilities for prisons, probation and the control of immigration is not the appropriate Department to ensure the right of reply.
I share many of the concerns that were expressed passionately and eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (M r. Sedgemore), when he went through the Government's disgraceful record on editorial interference in programmes such as "Real Lives" and "My Country Right or Wrong", the injunctions on the BBC's "Death on the Rock" and the refusal to accept the Windlesham report. There was also


their pressure through injunctions on The Guardian, The Independent and other newspapers, which is relevant to the Bill.

Mr. Renton: I greatly resent those ridiculous remarks. Does the hon. Gentleman not realise that it is because of our wish to protect the freedom of the press that we have been carefully neutral on this Bill and the Protection of Privacy Bill despite the support for them from Members of all parties? We are anxious that there should be no statutory control of the press.

Mr. Fisher: The Government are incapable of protecting editorial independence in the press or broadcasting, so they do not recommend themselves as being likely to protect the rights of the public through the right of reply. The Government's record is against them.
For the same reason I cannot agree with the hon. Member for Eastbourne who proposed that the matter should be dealt with by the Lord Chancellor's Department. We are dealing with issues of culture, communications, access, editorial independence, and freedom of speech and information. A Labour Government will set up a Ministry to deal with the arts and the media—[Interruption.] We made it clear at the last general election that we would do that. The Ministry would have responsibility for the press and would be the most suitable Ministry for protecting editorial independence. Broadcasting, publishing and the press have issues such as access and editorial independence in common, but they have little in common with prisons, the probation service and immigration.
The next Labour Government will introduce a Bill dealing with the right of reply, although it will not be in precisely the same form as the present Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Clydebank and Milngavie has often said, he has tried to carry hon. Members of a wide range of opinions with him, so he has pared down the Bill

to its essence. He has removed broadcasting, which is included in such legislation in many other European countries and he has removed other elements. The possible defeat of the Bill gives the Labour party time to consider afresh the form in which it will introduce a similar Bill when in government which other hon. Members will support. It will be part of a package that protects the consumer against the unbridled power of the press and protects editorial independence and the strength of journalists. We desperately need freedom of information legislation to protect the rights of journalists, just as we must protect the right of reply for individuals. The House has accepted the principle that the public have such a right of reply. Next, we must introduce such a Bill.

Mr. Worthington: I want to express my appreciation to all the supporters of the Bill for the help that they have given. I also want to express my appreciation to the oppontents of the Bill. An enormous amount of help has been given to the framing of future legislation on the right of reply. We recognise the complexities of the issue, and Labour Members have a genuine addiction to a free press. I also welcome the Minister's statement that there is to be a review of matters of privacy and related issues. But I am sure that the Minister will recognise that his statement has rivalled any in the past in its vagueness about the remit of the review, and he made no statement on who was to chair it.
Let me conclude by emphasising the seriousness of this matter. Next week will be the first anniversary of the death of a young actor called David Scarboro who used to be in East Enders. His family, his fellow villagers and many of his colleagues on the cast of East Enders believe that his death was brought about largely by press harassment yet the News of the World and The Sun never acknowledged their part in the misery that that lad's life became. I hope that we shall remember cases like that as we wait for the Press Council to try to put its house in order.
It being half-past Two o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.

Private Members' Bills

INTERNATIONAL PARLIAMENTARY ORGANISATIONS (REGISTRATIONS) BILL

Order read for consideration in Committee.

Hon. Members: Object.
Committee Friday 28 April.

LOTTERIES BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Not printed.

ABORTION (RIGHTS OF ANCILLARY WORKERS) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Second Reading deferred till Friday 5 May.

NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD BILL

Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Second Reading [10 February.]

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Second Reading what day? No day named.

INSTALLATION OF SMOKE DETECTORS BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 5 May.

SCOTLAND BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

FUEL AND ENERGY PROVISION BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 26 May.

PROTECTION OF RESIDENTS IN RETIREMENT HOMES BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 5 May.

HOUSING THE HOMELESS BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

HOUSING ASSOCIATIONS (ACCESS TO INFORMATION) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 28 April.

FUNERAL INDUSTRY (CODE OF PRACTICE) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

LONDON GOVERNMENT BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Not moved.

JUNIOR HOSPITAL DOCTORS (REGULATION OF HOURS) BILL [Lords]

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 28 April.

COAL MINING SUBSIDENCE (DAMAGE, ARBITRATION, PREVENTION AND PUBLIC AWARENESS) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 12 May.

RELIGIOUS PROSECUTIONS (ABOLITION) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 7 July.

INDECENT DISPLAYS (NEWSPAPERS AND WORKPLACES) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 28 April.

AGE OF LEGAL CAPACITY (SCOTLAND) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Second Reading what day? No day named.

GAMING MACHINES (PROHIBITION ON USE BY PERSONS UNDER EIGHTEEN) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till 12 May

RIDERS OF EQUINE ANIMALS (WEARING OF PROTECTIVE HEADGEAR) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 28 April.

COUNTING WOMEN'S UNREMUNERATED WORK BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Second Reading what day? No day named.

BRITISH RACING COMMISSION BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 12 May.

FOOTBALL SPECTATORS (No. 2) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Hon. Members: Object.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 12 May.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,
That, at the sitting on Tuesday 25th April, the Motion in the name of Mr. Neil Kinnock relating to Health and Safety may be proceeded with, though opposed, for one and a half hours after it has been entered upon; and if proceedings thereon have not been disposed of at the end of that period, Mr. Speaker shall then put the Question.—[Mr. Alan Howarth.]

Fullerton Hospital, Doncaster

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Alan Howarth.]

Mr. Martin Redmond: I am pleased to have this opportunity to draw to the attention of the House the disastrous consequences that the closure of Fullerton hospital will have for the local community. The importance of the matter is evidenced by the presence of so many hon. Friends. Fullerton hospital was built by the Denaby-Conisbrough community many years ago, to provide facilities for and to meet the demands of local people. Cadeby and Denaby pits were major contributors to the building of that hospital. However, when the National Health Service was created, the local community had no hesitation in seeing that Fullerton was a part of the service.
The building has not had much spent on it in the past. Nevertheless, it is still a substantial building which has stood the test of time. It is surrounded by gardens, providing a healthy environment for patients in their twilight years. There was a need for Fullerton when it was built, and there is still a need for it now.
The two wards at Montagu hospital will not stand the test of time and will require substantial amounts of money spent on them if they are to remain in use in, possibly, 10 years. Also, Montagu hospital does not have the same environment as Fullerton.
Doncaster hospital has one of the lowest administration costs in the country. It has been and still is nurse-oriented, but, because of the way in which the Government funded the pay rise last year, Doncaster now has financial difficulties. If that were not so and if the Government had played the game with the health authority, I would not be making this case for Fullerton hospital this afternoon.
By closing Fullerton hospital and thus reducing services, £100,000 will be saved to fulfil the previous commitment to Montagu hospital—robbing Peter to pay Paul, or hand-to-mouth short-term policies. I honestly believe that the long-term needs of the Doncaster area will be met only by long-term planning. If the authority did not have such financial problems, which are through no fault of its own, it would have opened a children's wing.
Last week, I received a letter from the Minister, drawing my attention to this new development. But there is no money to staff it. Is the Minister suggesting that another old folks hospital such as Fullerton should be closed to get the money to provide the staff? The Cancer Trust in Doncaster is providing a hospice. Doncaster health authority cannot meet the promise on the staffing of it.
There is a cash crisis in Doncaster, and the closure of Fullerton will result in several premature deaths. The closure of Fullerton has no relation to the future needs of Doncaster. We must ask whether we are to provide love and care for our elderly or allow them to end their lives alone and unwanted. Society owes it to them to allow them to end their lives in dignity, and we should show them some compassion in their twilight years. That is the hallmark of a civilised society. The problem is a growing number of elderly people and the absence of any long-term strategy to cope with them.
We still await the Government's reponse to the Griffiths report, which is wanted as quickly as possible and should be considered in conjunction with the Wagner report. There is a national discrepancy between the number of residential and National Health Service beds of about 25,000. For humane reasons alone, there is a case for keeping Fullerton open until the sums are correct. If Fullerton closes, that will have terrible consequences for a long-term policy has yet to be determined.
Trent regional health authority has no long-term plans. According to a recent parliamentary answer, Trent is still holding consultations and reviewing its strategy. Examination of Doncaster's population shows that those aged between 75 and 85 numbered 12,785 in 1986. By 1996, that figure will grow to 14,290—an increase of 11·8 per cent. By 2006, that aged population will grow to 15,720—an increase of 23 per cent. In 1986, those aged 85 or more in Doncaster totalled 2,750. By 1996, that figure will grow to 3,161—an increase of 14·9 per cent. By 2006, the figure will be 5,070—an 84·3 per cent. increase. Those figures are horrendous.
The local authority will not be able to assist because the average age of those in local authority care is 82. More than 80 per cent. of all residents in social service care are more than 75 years of age. Everyone knows that local authority part III accommodation is under stress. Because of the make-up of our population, social services are the second biggest spenders in the local authority. The local authority has suffered a one third reduction in rate support grant since the Government were elected in 1979, and one can see the effect that that has had.
The Dearne valley is a deprived area, and that is why the Government, with the co-operation of the local authority, are endeavouring to lift morale. However, with the proposed closure, the health authority will undermine the work both of the Government and of the local authority.
Because of high unemployment, many people leave the area to seek work. It is the young and active who leave, giving rise to an imbalance in the population and to a disproportionate number of the infirm and elderly to be looked after. The family unit is split up, because if the young go away to seek work, they cannot take with them their elderly or infirm parents. As a consequence, the local authority has to provide care services. Other family members who remain are faced with Government regulations that hit those wishing to meet their family responsibilities, because the care allowance is so small. Looking after their parents could financially affect their own families.
I turn to the Trent regional health authority report, a copy of which I presume the Minister has. The report of the health authority's sub-committee gives the background to the proposed relocation. The sub-committee took just five minutes to discuss that important subject, which is deplorable. Paragraph 1.2 of the report states:
Fullerton Hospital … currently provides a maximum of 34 beds.
However, it is stated later:
There are currently 25 beds in use at Fullerton Hospital.
That represents a deliberate policy of run-down by the local authority in advance of the Minister's decision.
Paragraph 1.3.3 talks about paramedics, but not with this type of patient. I should like the Minister to look at some photographs I have here because they depict the type of patient. Paragraph 13 talks about Fullerton having to

be served from Montagu hospital. Montagu hospital is already linked with Doncaster royal infirmary, so I do not see any difference between DRI-Montagu and Montagu-Fullerton.
Paragraph 1.3.4 talks about savings of £100,000. I question whether that is a true figure. Certainly when one takes into consideration humanitarian aspects, money pales into insignificance. Paragraph 1.3.5 talks about appropriate medical care, but it is rubbish. Fullerton is better. Paragraph 1.4 talks about the relocation of services. Could we not have a ballot of staff, patients and the community on that?
I pay tribute to the staff and friends of Fullerton hospital. They have played a tremendous role in the past and have been instrumental in adding many years to patients' lives. Paragraph 3.2.2 talks about giving the name "Fullerton" to a ward at Montagu hospital. That is a load of rubbish. Paragraph 3.2.3 talks about upgrading, but, because of the financial problems of Doncaster, that will not take place. I do not think that the proposals in paragraph 3.2.4 will take place either.
Paragraph 3.2.5 talks about Conisbrough hospital being at risk. Unless we get cash to maintain services, we are on a downward spiral. Paragraph 3.2.6 will be affected by restrictions on finances. All I can say on paragraph 3.2.7 is that Doncaster council has its own financial problems. One must question whether paragraph 3.2.9 is correct. Money problems will affect paragraph 3.3. For those reasons we need to look again.
The principles that adequate health care should be provided to all regardless of ability to pay must be the foundation of any arrangements for financing the Health Service.
Those are not my words, but those of the Prime Minister at the Conservative party conference in 1982 and repeated in the 1983 Conservative party manifesto.
I pay tribute to all those connected with Fullerton. They have done a tremendous job in the past and would do so in future. Will the Minister instruct the health authority to consult the patients and the staff at Fullerton, and the people of Doncaster? If he does, there will be an overwhelming majority, indeed a unanimous vote, to keep Fullerton open. I plead with the Minister on behalf of the elderly who have been served so well in the past and on behalf of my constituents to intervene and keep Fullerton open.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Roger Freeman): I congratulate the hon. Member for Don Valley (Mr. Redmond) on his success in the ballot. I know that the hon. Gentleman takes a keen interest in the welfare of his constituents and in the affairs of his local district health authority, Doncaster, and its region. Trent. The hon. Gentleman pursues that interest with great energy and vigour. I am well aware that the hon. Gentleman served as vice-chairman of Doncaster health authority in 1982. I am sure that the House appreciates the clear and direct way in which he has presented the arguments on behalf of his constituents. As he knows, I stood for election in his constituency in 1979, and I have great respect for him, for his constituents and for the county of South Yorkshire.
Fullerton hospital has been serving the people of Doncaster for more than three quarters of a century—initially providing acute services to the local area and for


many years catering for orthopaedic patients transferred from the Doncaster royal infirmary. In recent years the hospital has been used to provide continuing care for elderly patients. Given that history, I well understand the intense feelings of loyalty that it arouses among the local community. The health advisory service, when it looked at services for the elderly in Doncaster at the end of 1987, praised the good quality of care being given at Fullerton. I should like to echo what the health advisory service said and put on record the Government's appreciation of the tremendous efforts and dedication of the hospital's staff over many years.
I know, too, that there has been considerable uncertainty about the future of Fullerton hospital for some time now and that proposals to close the hospital were put forward two years ago, but later withdrawn. I am sure that it is in everyone's interest for that uncertainty to be ended quickly. The health advisory service advised Doncaster health authority to include Fullerton in its reconsideration of the disposition of beds for the elderly.
It would be quite wrong for me to comment further on the current proposal, because, as the hon. Gentleman knows, it is about to be referred to Ministers. I understand that it will reach the Ministry next week. It might, however, be helpful if I were to outline where matters stand at present on the health authority's proposal.
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware that there is an established procedure that must be followed before the closure or change of use of National Health Service facilities. Doncaster health authority issued a consultation document in October last year in which it proposed to transfer 35 beds for the elderly from Fullerton hospital to the Montagu hospital two miles away in Mexborough, with a view to the Fullerton closing later this year.
The local community health council objected to the proposal to transfer services to Mexborough Montagu hospital and to close Fullerton and so the matter was subsequently referred to the regional health authority, where it was considered by a members' panel. I know that that panel visited Fullerton hospital and the wards at Montagu hospital to which it is proposed that services should transfer and met representatives of staff and the local community.
At its meeting on 10 April, the regional health authority endorsed the recommendation of the members' panel and approved Doncaster health authority's proposal to close Fullerton, subject to a number of conditions being met. Doncaster district health authority has indicated that it will be able to comply with those conditions. Doncaster community health council still wishes to object in the light of the conditions the regional health authority has placed on implementation of the closure. The hon. Gentleman outlined some of those objections. The proposal will therefore come to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of state for Health for a final decision.
As I have said, I cannot comment further on the proposal at this stage, because I do not wish to prejudice that decision. I do, however, understand the concern that has been expressed today on the subject. I can promise the hon. Member for Don Valley that when the proposal does come to the Department we shall give the matter the very

careful consideration that it clearly deserves. In doing so, I can assure him that full account will be taken of the points which he has made so clearly this afternoon.
In addition, given the projections for the ageing population over the years up to 2000 in the Doncaster health authority area, and indeed South Yorkshire as a whole, in the hon. Gentleman's judgment as, indeed, in mine, there must be adequate provision in future for the care of the elderly. His point was that a decision now could prejudice the ability of the health authority to continue to meet that demand. I carefully noted his point and I can assure the hon. Gentleman that, when we come to consider the representations in the case, we will bear that in mind.
I shall refer briefly to some of the services that Doncaster health authority provides and seek to answer the points made by the hon. Gentleman. I am glad to say that Doncaster health authority has benefited considerably from an expansion of resources. To take this year as an example, the health authority has an initial cash allocation of £61,589,000, which represents a real terms increase of 2·8 per cent. over last year—the third highest in the Trent region. That will bring Doncaster to a funding level of 96 per cent. of its RAWP target. I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman's point that, historically, Doncaster has been relatively under-funded. In recent years progress has been made, but the RAWP target has not yet been achieved.

Mr. Redmond: I believe that the RAWP has gone by the wayside. Doncaster has a cash problem and it is tearing at the services provided for its people. It is no good having new facilities if we do not have sufficient staff to maintain present levels of service. When considering the long-term needs of Doncaster it is important to consider the horrific figures I have given. I can substantiate those figures and if the Minister wants a meeting some time before he makes his decision I will provide the evidence.

Mr. Freeman: I would be glad to meet the hon. Gentleman at his convenience to go over the figures. He is right that, in two years' time, RAWP will disappear and that we shall move to a system of weighted capitation funding of the regions and in turn, the districts. That funding will reflect not only the total number of patients within a district health authority, but relative mobility and the relative cost of providing services. I will be glad to pursue this particular matter with the hon. Gentleman in due course.
The Doncaster health authority is using the injection of funds to develop and improve many of its services and facilities. The most notable recent example is the newly opened children's unit at the Doncaster royal infirmary. The unit is providing four new wards plus new out-patient and child assessment facilities at a total cost of about £31½ million. It means children's facilities at Doncaster have now been brought together on a single site.
The hon. Gentleman has said that three wards are open now, but one is not and that an appeal has been launched to raise sufficient funds to open it. The health authority had planned to open the fourth ward in 1991. Clearly if one is building facilities it is much easier to build four rather than three, even if the intention is to bring the fourth ward on stream in a number of years' time.
I understand that the health authority's formal plan was to bring the fourth ward on stream in two years' time. There is full revenue funding in the budget for that. The health authority then decided to launch an appeal to


accelerate the opening of the fourth ward. That appeal has been remarkably successful and that is a tribute to the great generosity of the people of Doncaster. I hope that the health authority will be able to open the fourth ward earlier than expected. That decision will enable the health authority to do other things that would not otherwise be possible as the commissioning costs for the fourth ward, which are funded at present from 1991, will no longer be needed. I have already said that the revenue implications of opening the fourth ward from 1991 have already been taken into account in the budget.

Mr. Redmond: Doncaster health authority launched a cash appeal to provide staff for the children's ward. That is the first time in its history that the health authority has gone out to ask for money to staff a hospital or a ward. Previous cash appeals have gone for the cream on the cake—to provide televisions or to ensure that other patient needs are met. Never before has an appeal been launched to meet staffing needs.

Mr. Freeman: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The purpose of the appeal is to bring forward the opening of the fourth ward by two years, and to provide the capital and commissioning costs and revenue costs for the staff for those two years, but not beyond 1991. I do not believe that there is any dispute between us about the facts.
Doncaster health authority decided on such action because it had seen the tremendous success of the Great

Ormond Street "Wishing Well" appeal. I am sorry that some people think that the appeal is for the entire unit, or that it is a reflection on the health authority's determination to provide good children's care. It was launched for the best of motives. Observing the nation's generosity in the "Wishing Well" appeal, the authority saw a chance to accelerate the opening of the fourth ward.
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will join me in complimenting the authority on the "Putting People First" initiative, launched in, I believe, 1984 as part of a regional campaign. I think that all parties in the House, whatever their disagreements about certain elements in our proposed NHS reforms, would agree with the excellent pamphlet provided by Doncaster health authority. I shall study the photographs with great interest. Patients in all hospitals, including Fullerton, should be treated as individuals. All members of staff, whether doctors, nurses or support staff, should treat people sympathetically and sensitively as individuals.
This has been a useful debate. I repeat the assurance that I gave the hon. Gentleman earlier: we shall give careful consideration to the proposal when it arrives next week following the objections of the Doncaster health council. I also assure him that I shall be happy to meet him to discuss the wider issue of resource funding for the Doncaster health authority.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at one minute past Three o'clock.